Hitting a wall: The great UTM challenge

In the beginning was the firewall, and it was pretty good. A big box of rules that sat between your network and the evils of the Internet, the firewall examined ports and protocols to decide which packets got in and which were barred at the door. Then things got, as things often do, complicated. New threats came sneaking in on trusted protocols, ports and protocols became tangled, and looking inside packets became just as important as noting their source, destination, and type.

Protecting a network now meant deploying multiple firewall types (network, endpoint, application), anti-virus protection, content filters, intrusion detection systems, and more. Instead of a big box of rules, you needed a relay rack stuffed top to bottom with appliances -- each with its own administrative interface, and each representing a possible point of failure in the network. There had to be a better way, especially for smaller companies that couldn't afford a massive staff to feed and care for the relay racks full of appliances -- and thus, the unified threat manager (UTM) was born.

[ Read the InfoWorld UTM reviews: Astaro Security Gateway 425 | SonicWall NSA E7500 | WatchGuard Firebox Peak X5500e | ZyXel ZyWall USG1000. Compare the UTMs feature by feature. ]

Indeed, a rapidly growing number of small and mid-size companies are opting for the administrative and operational simplicity of the single-box solution. And so we decided that UTMs aimed at the mid-size company were the perfect group to use for the rollout of InfoWorld's new firewall and UTM test protocols. When we began this process well over a year ago, we asked for input from virtually every firewall and UTM vendor we knew, and we invited every UTM vendor we could find to send us an appliance to test. In the end, four vendors answered the call. Astaro, SonicWall, WatchGuard, and ZyXel submitted units for this first set of tests.

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