All-in-one information security challenges

Aug 22, 2006 2:17 PM

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, according to an article by Network World.
UTM products on the market today can potentially suffer as much as a 50 percent loss in performance as all security services are put to use.
"When you turn on all the services, the speed is impacted," says John Kuhn, product line manager at SonicWall. "Absolutely there is a performance consideration, and it could be a 50 percent loss."
Several other UTM appliance vendors, including Internet Security Systems (ISS), Secure Computing and Symantec, are equally blunt that customers could experience as much as a 50 percent performance loss in speed.
"In general, it's more like 10, but 50 percent is possible," says Mark Butler, director of product marketing at ISS.
Despite any drawbacks associated with bandwidth, UTM seems to be here to stay. UTM appliances vary considerably from vendor to vendor. Some vendors making UTM products must partner with other security firms to support antivirus, or other content-filtering, on their UTM products when they don't have the technology in-house.
According to the Network World article, most vendors see their UTM products deployed at the Internet gateway, although Mike Jones, Cisco's senior product manager, says "it's no longer about protecting just the Internet edge, but going inside" to provide firewall, antivirus antispam and URL filtering deep within the corporate network.
But with UTM growing in popularity, one question that arises is whether the market will see a drop in stand-alone devices, such as firewalls or spam filters.
Future of UTM Each vendor sees its UTM future differently, but a common concern is analyzing the impact VoIP traffic might have on UTM design now that customers are starting to put VoIP traffic through UTM gateways.
"As you add voice traffic to the network, there are a lot more small packets that make the box work harder," Chris Roekl, vice president of corporate marketing at UTM vendor Fortinet, told the publication. Fortinet also envisions ways to inspect VoIP traffic for viruses that might be injected into VoIP streams.
"We're looking at the various attacks," Roeckl says.

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