Frost & Sullivan: UTM Solutions Need to be Strengthened to Meet Large Organizations' Needs
The Unified Threat Management solutions market has grown
recently due to its attractive network security approach and the
increased demand for integrated security. Small and medium businesses are satisfied with current UTM solutions, but enterprise and
high security organizations will require best-of-breed operability to
fulfill their needs. According to Frost & Sullivan, vendors looking
to penetrate this market must offer developed products, with commercial
grade functionality first and foremost, as penetration into the large
enterprise customer markets will be crucial to sustain high growth
rates.
"The
UTM concept is based on the assumption that a combination of security
solutions bundled in the same appliance will create a better security
umbrella for organizations," says Ariel Avitan,
Frost & Sullivan's Industry Analyst for Network Security
Technologies. "Another main advantage of UTM solutions is their low
cost in comparison to purchasing many different security solutions.
These two advantages are driving the rapid adoption of UTM solutions by
SMB customers."
UTM
vendors have traditionally targeted SMB and SOHO/ROBO network and these
customers will continue to value broader product coverage and cost
effective solutions. In 2009, these segments accounted for 53.6
percent of market revenues globally. However, total market revenues are
expected to shift towards the enterprise market, as UTM products
improve in functionality and reliability.
Typical
UTM solutions include a Firewall, IPS/IDS, an AV (Antivirus), an AS
(Anti-Spam) component and a VPN. "While the ability to provide higher
level security such as AV and AS attracts enterprise customers, the
restraint of such solutions lays in their lack of ability to inspect
the amount of data going through an enterprise-size network," adds
Avitan.
A
critical area of improvement for UTM vendors is product performance.
While the value proposition of UTM solutions lies in their ability to
integrate a wide breadth of security applications, large organizations
will continue purchasing best-of-breed security solutions if their
security standards are not being met by the UTM solution.
According
to Avitan, "The need for high performance security products in the
market was the spark that led a number of network security companies to
develop solutions to deal with the intensity of enterprise data flow."
One
of these solutions is proposed by Wedge Networks, the company behind
the BeSecure line of products. Wedge Networks has developed a patented
next generation deep content inspection engine called the "SubSonic
engine," capable of detecting, flagging, and blocking malware, spam and
viruses at very high accuracy rates while screening high volumes of
data with very low impact on network performance.
The
Wedge BeSecure was tested already and found superior to the leading UTM
solutions with an accuracy rate over 98 percent in malware detection
and blocking, against some 86 percent for the leading UTM solutions.
"These results are no surprise when the leading UTM solutions are based
on packet filtering, or shallow application inspection, e.g. web
filtering, that do not accurately detect malware embedded in the
application layer," says Avitan.
Frost
& Sullivan believes that companies with an innovative approach to
developing new solutions will increase their market share in the
content security market. "They effectively plugged a security hole for
organizations who struggle to find solutions that fit their data
throughput needs while maintaining high detection accuracy, a fit that
is critical for their business continuity and is not met by UTM
solutions offered in the market today," concludes Avitan.