Unified Threat Management (UTM) at the Enterprise Scale
The market in unified threat management firewalls is maturing and according to a Network World article by Joel Snyder, titled UTM Firewalls:Ready for the Enterprise, they're not just for the small and mid-sized market anymore. I don't have an argument with his findings, I think the big hurdle for UTM vendors is overcoming organization's structures. The people responsible for AV aren't the same ones responsible for firewalls or URL blocking. Yes, there are a lot of advantages to working with a single console and the quality of some of the components are as good or nearly as good as stand alone products, but how can you convince three or four groups in the IT department of that?
Snyder points out:
This single management view is especially valuable when firewall, VPN and IDS/IPS are considered together because all three of these functions act on the same policy. Each of these functions needs to have some view of the topology of the network, what applications are running on different servers and what different groups of users are allowed to do. Completely separate management for all three functions makes coordinated policy maintenance difficult, if not impossible.A single UTM-ready management console realistically enables a fine-tuning of policy across all three functions, increasing total security.
It makes sense in small and mid-size businesses but I'm not sure how long it will take to shift responsibilities and ways of thinking about security management to get big organizations to buy into UTM.
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