For mid-market, growing businesses, cybersecurity is often a secondary priority — if not an afterthought. The primary focus is always on developing and rolling out products and services.
Well, the focus should be on cybersecurity, of course. But all too often, this means that instead of being guided by security best practices and fortifying key services with the best available technology, these organizations take on unnecessary risk. They buy and deploy point solutions like this:
- A firewall from vendor A
- An intrusion prevention/detection system from vendor B
- Antivirus/antimalware from vendor C
…and so forth. In theory, these layers combine to create effective security.
But in practice, many problems arise because the various technologies, protocols, and interfaces weren’t designed for each other by the same engineering team. Consequently, the organization actually winds up with diminished security and higher risks of a potentially catastrophic breach.
This is the logic behind the success of Unified Threat Management (UTM) solutions over the last decade. What they offer, instead, is a single appliance that combines a broad range of security technologies, yielding significantly optimized and accelerated protection against many classes of threats and exploits.
Ten Reasons To Go UTM
A UTM is a particularly compelling offering for mid-market organizations. Why? Here are ten reasons:
- Instead of maintaining/updating many security solutions, the organization only maintains/updates one.
- Instead of having to navigate many management interfaces to carry out security tasks, the organization only needs to navigate one.
- There is no longer the chance that an unexpected flaw in one product from one company, can bring down the total security strategy.
- The organization no longer has to pay many subscription fees to keep solutions updated.
- Interoperability shortfalls are a thing of the past, because the UTM solution is built from the ground up by a single vendor.
- The number of points of failure, in general, falls to one: The UTM solution. (This does mandate picking the right UTM solution, though!)
- Fewer security solutions mean less heat and a smaller power bill.
- UTM responds faster to security threats than distributed solutions, reducing the window of opportunity for threats to create a problem.
- Advanced attacks (such as APTs) are more likely to get past a distributed architecture than a UTM solution.
- Over time, as more and more tech is added to a distributed architecture, it gets harder to manage. Not so in the case of UTM.
Get The Best Outcome Via the Best Help
Now, if you’re interested in pursuing UTM, what’s the next step?
That depends very much on your context and needs. But in general, you’ll get the best results from collaborating with a trusted partner that has a proven track record.
Platte River Networks not only has an impressive history of customer engagements — we also partner with Fortinet, a leading UTM solution provider, whose technology has been said to “set the cadence for the UTM market” by no less respected an analyst than Gartner Group. Get in touch with us to find out more!
