UTM firewalls: Ready for the enterprise

IT managers at small and midsize businesses like unified threat management appliances - firewalls that layer on antimalware protection, content filtering, antispam and intrusion prevention - because deploying a single, multi-function device reduces costs and simplifies configuration.

However, deciding whether and where to deploy UTM appliances in a large enterprise is a more complicated and difficult decision. The idea of a single point through which all traffic flows as an obvious locus for threat mitigation doesn't work when a network has dozens, hundreds or thousands of distinct locations. Also, because performance is a critical issue in large networks, savvy network managers often seek to distribute threat protection rather than centralize it, simply to reduce the likelihood of a performance bottleneck.

Similarly, the style and quality of threat mitigation features one commonly sees in an SMB UTM may not be of interest to an enterprise, where requirements are more exacting and security architectures are more complex. For example, the antispam features and functionality in UTM firewalls pale compared with those in stand-alone enterprise-class dedicated antispam/antivirus appliances.

With such dramatic differences between SMB and enterprise requirements, is there a place for enterprise UTM firewalls? The answer is definitely "yes," for these three reasons: reduced complexity, simplified management and increased flexibility.

Reduced complexity

Enterprise network managers have long sought to include additional threat protection, especially intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDS/IPS) functions, both at the core and at the perimeters of their networks. However, the complexity of dropping standalone IDS/IPS boxes into a network has made them wary.

Building the "firewall sandwich," with load balancers surrounding a core of clustered firewalls, is well understood, but trying to scale that sandwich up with another layer of protection dramatically increases architectural complexity and potential instability.