Unified Threat Management (UTM) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

Unified Threat Management (UTM) - Essay Example Making distinctions between these threats is often an exercise in futility: Thus, the birth of the UTM movement. Unfortunately, at present, UTMs benefits are apocryphal: Though arguably superior to existing offerings, they are far from complete security suites. UTM is operationally defined by SC Magazine thusly: â€Å"[T]o be a true UTM, according to analyst firm IDC anyway, the product must include, at minimum, a firewall, intrusion detection and prevention and anti-virus functionality† (2007). This paper assumes this definition. SonicWall argues that the reason for UTM is because the vast majority of consumers, whether individual home networks or large corporate and government networks, are not just doing one thing online at any given time, or even through any one application (2008)! â€Å"Network communications no longer just rely on store-and-forward applications like e-mail. It has now grown to include real-time collaboration tools, Web 2.0 applications, instant messenger (IM) and peer-to-peer applications, Voice over IP (VoIP)...† (2008). Consider games and digital distribution platform Steam. In one program, there is a friends list, social networking utilities and functionalities, games, digital backup, downloading and peer-to-peer transfer protocols, IM and online store functionality! Threats proliferate under that environment. A virus transferred from e-mail can be used to spam the addresses on ones IM list. A keylogger hidden in a torrent can gather credit card information put into a browser. There are no clear lines between threats; why make there be a clear line in protection and defense? The problem that many IT security professionals see with UTM is that focused programs are likely to have functionalities and specializations that a general solution might not (SC Magazine, 2007). â€Å"The bad news is that this creates a single point of failure. It also creates a bit of