UTM stands for Universal Threat Management. In today’s market we are no longer in fear of viruses as they are now only a small part of the threats against us and our computers. Let’s take a look at some of the key threats; gateway and network anti-Virus (GAV/NAV); anti-Spam (AS), Phishing (AP), Intrusion Protection (IP), Application Intelligence (AI) and Content Filtering (CF).
How do we manage all of this? If you have a business or even a small home office with more than one computer you address these threats at the point of attack. Each computer. And the more computers you have the more UTM applications you have running. As the number of computers grows, so does the number of application and along with it, yearly renewals to keep it up to date. And as you increase this number, you magically increase the chance of something going wrong. And the last thing you want is an unprotected device.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could take the UTM from each device and put it in one place and have it protect the network instead of the computer. That is primarily what a Firewall Device is designed to do. Not only does it greatly reduce the overhead of maintaining UTM on each device, it centrally controls it. It also increases the security level of your network as now as any would be attacks are now at the firewall device rather than your computer.