Unified Threat Management

What Unified Threat Management is?

As the technology evolves quickly and devices get interconnected, the cyber threats are also rapidly increasing and getting more sophisticated. The traditional security measures including firewalls, VPN, IDS, and anti-virus software that works in siloes are not competent enough to shield the global organizations from the new age cyber threats. Apparently, these multi-channel security measures make cyber security landscape more complex in an organizational environment. As a single weak chain can break the entire defense barrier, organizations are highly concerned about how to effectively manage the evolving cyber threats. Here comes the relevance of a unified approach in security and threat management. Unified Threat Management (UTM) represents a category of security features integrated into a centralized appliance which can be plugged into an organizational security hub. It consolidates all the disparate security points and reduces the complexity in addressing blended threats that enterprises largely encounter with, these days.

Significance of Unified Threat Management Security

Securing IT infrastructure is a complex task in this age of sophisticated and advanced cyber-attack models. However not every organization can afford the dedicated cyber risk management environment to address the impending threats. Many organizations rely on separate standalone systems for managing multiple security applications for maintaining the security posture. However, each of these security systems requires configuration, licensing, training, management and ongoing maintenance with regular patches and updates. Compiling data from these disparate hardware systems is also a daunting challenge. All these processes require a lot of manual assistance and time which incur a lot of costs. At a time when the cyber-attacks target small to medium organizations that have very weak defense mechanisms, maintaining an efficient security posture with separate standalone systems and practices is very inefficient. The concept of Unified Threat Management Security solutions holds greater significance here. Unified Threat management solutions with a single platform can be plugged into the company network to manage security their security posture. Instead of disparate systems for different applications, it consolidates multiple interconnected security applications into a single piece of hardware which is cost- effective and easier to manage with less human intervention. In Unified Threat Management system, all the security functionalities reside within a single device console to provide a unified coverage. This single device approach saves server space, utilizes less power and requires less cooling requirements.

Essential Components of Unified Threat Management Security Solutions

1. Application Control: Application control is a next gen firewall feature that identifies and controls the applications that generate more traffic in the organizational network.

2. Intrusion Prevention System (IPS): IPS identifies the attacks that originate beyond and inside the network perimeter and protects the internal p>network. It offers a wide range of features including predefined/ custom signature and packet logging to detect and block malicious activities on the internal network.

3. Spam Filter: Anti-spam technologies are an integral part of UTM systems. They detect threats by various techniques including blocking spammed IP’s and spammed emails, conducting DNS look ups, IP comparison etc.

4. Antivirus filter: Antivirus filter in UTM screens all files in a database for virus signatures and infected file patterns and provide multi layered protection against malware attacks.

5. Data Loss Prevention System (DLP): DLP systems incorporated in the UTM systems prevent intentional or unintentional leakage of data to and fro the organization. The filtering scans in DLP systems helps in allowing, blocking or archiving the content based on the text strings and pattern matches with the DLP data base.

Features and benefits of Unified Threat Management Solutions

Features

• Firewall to keep the unwanted traffic away from the organizational network
• Online gateway security which covers virus scanning, malware scanning, checking of phishing mails with malicious attachments
• Integrated approach which improves attack identification and reduce false positives
• Network Intrusion Prevention system to prevent attacks on unpatched systems
• Remote access security
• Auto updating of latest security/ antivirus updates or features Minimal human intervention required
• Secure wireless capabilities

Benefits

• Single consolidated management for multiple security applications
• Simplified infrastructure and simplified management
• More efficient security management
• Lower cost due to smaller number of devices to manage
• Lower operator training requirements
• Less power and cooling requirements

Happiest Minds’ play in UTM: Cyber Risk Protection Platform (CRPP)