Unfortunately, purchasing and deploying a full range of best-of-breed security solutions can be daunting for small-mid sized businesses that typically have only have a fraction of the resources and budgets of larger enterprises. These customers are typically willing to sacrifice best-in-class security, performance and features for simplicity, ease-of-use, and low price. To better serve this segment of the market where simplicity and low cost are top priorities, Unified Threat Management (UTM) products have emerged.
UTM is the evolution of the traditional Firewall into a Swiss Army product that not only includes a firewall but also content inspection and filtering, spam filtering, intrusion detection and anti-virus. The biggest value with UTM platforms is simplicity and lower price given its “all-in-one” footprint. While UTM solutions provide significant benefits, especially for SMBs, the design of many UTM appliances on the market today is a compromise of performance, functionality, price and simplicity.
Performance: The practical performance of a UTM appliance is often not obvious from reading the appliance specifications, since they typically depict just the performance of the firewall with the other security applications disabled or providing minimal functionality. The anti-virus performance of a UTM is typically limited to a small set of in-the-wild viruses, supported by a limited virus signature database. When simultaneously running another scanning application such as anti-spyware, UTMs will become less accurate as the scanning coverage is scaled down in an attempt to maintain speed throughput, or a combination of reduced accuracy and lower speed.
Scalability: With limited throughput and system performance, first-generation UTMs are expected to quickly run out of horsepower to keep up with the broadband speeds enterprises are demanding. Additionally, since many security platforms today utilize signature-based technologies, being able to flexibly reconfigure the platform and update the signature databases, in response to new variants and threats, has become essential. Utilizing a high-performance acceleration engine that can be easily integrated into an existing appliance and operate in conjunction with the appliance’s core CPU/NPU, UTM performance can be accelerated by as much as 70X.
Designed to accelerate bottleneck operations associated with supporting multiple simultaneous applications, high-speed packet process and content inspection, a security acceleration engine can provides CPU/NPU offload and ensure multiple application support with full content coverage and accuracy while maintaining throughout performance.
http://www.it-observer.com/articles/1151/utm_preparing_new_generation_security_threats/