Verizon Business launches managed Unified Threat Management service

Verizon Business expanded its managed services portfolio Wednesday by announcing that it will be offering a Unified Threat Management service that includes firewall, antivirus and spam services, content filtering and VPN capabilities.

According to Cindy Bellefeuille, the director for solution and product marketing for Verizon Business, the new offering will condense multiple security services into one device. Thus, she says, customers will be able to filter content, block spam and host VPNs without deploying multiple boxes at their facilities.

Verizon says the service will be ideal for midsize businesses and for enterprises that want to save money in providing security to their remote offices.

The UTM services (compare UTM products) will be deployed on-site and will be compatible with both Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances and with Juniper's Unified Threat Management platform. Bellefeuille says the company is only offering its UTM services on customer premises at the moment and won't be offering UTM as part of its "cloud-based" service package for the foreseeable future. Currently, Verizon does offer managed firewall, denial-of-service defense detection and managed network IPS as cloud-based services.

Verizon Business, as it does for its other managed services, will offer its UTM services in three tiers. The standard service focuses primarily on high-risk security threats by monitoring devices, analyzing threats and reporting security incidents. The premium and platinum options, meanwhile, attempt to reduce overall risk by analyzing all events, not merely high-risk ones. While Verizon would not disclose specific pricing information for the options, it did say the premium and platinum options cost roughly 40% more than the standard service option.

Additionally, the company says it will give customers the option of either managing their own UTM service or of letting Verizon manage the service for them. In both options, Verizon is responsible for monitoring the customer's network for security threats.

Amy DeCarlo, a principal analyst at Current Analysis, says Verizon's UTM announcement is "solid but not earth-shattering," as companies such as IBM and Orange Business Services. However, she adds the UTM offering is a strong addition to Verizon's managed services portfolio and that "it's a very elegant, efficient and practical way to pull security information from a lot of devices and present it so that it can be acted upon."

Managed services have increasingly become central to Verizon Business's core product offerings. In order to improve its managed services capabilities, Verizon Business has invested more than $150 million in its Impact management platform, one of its major assets in managing customer network services, over the past two years. Currently, Verizon Business manages more than 3,700 customer networks in more than 140 countries, as well more than 250,000 customer communications devices worldwide. The company has rolled out several new management services over the past two years, including telecom management services, a managed wireless LAN service, a WAN optimization service and VoIP migration services for business.