All-in-one security devices face challenges

All-in-one security devices face challenges

By Ellen Messmer

The multipurpose security appliances that consolidate firewall/VPN, content filtering, intrusion prevention and more into a single box are winning favor as easy-to-manage devices. But the open secret about these unified threat management (UTM) appliances is that they take a bite out of bandwidth as they inspect content.

It’s not uncommon for UTM products on the market today to suffer as much as a 50% loss in performance as the full panoply of security services is put to use. That’s a situation acknowledged by UTM vendors, which sometimes advise customers to compensate by getting higher-bandwidth devices than they ordinarily might need.

“When you turn on all the services, the speed is impacted,” says John Kuhn, product line manager at SonicWall, whose UTM products range in bandwidth support from tens of megabit per second to more than one gigabit. “Absolutely there is a performance consideration, and it could be a 50% loss.”

And what’s true for a UTM appliance at the low end is also true at the high end with appliances that attain multi-gigabit speeds.

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