Given how much time we’ve spent discusing application awareness and how these new capabilities pretty much stomp all over existing security products like IDS/IPS and web filters, does that mean standalone network security devices go away? Should you just quietly accept that unified threat management (UTM) is the way to go because the enterprise firewall provides multiple functions? Not exactly.
First let’s talk about the rise of UTM, even in the enterprise. The drive towards UTM started with smaller businesses, where using a single device for firewall, IDS/IPS, anti-spam, web filtering, gateway AV, and other functions reduced complexity and cost – and thus made a lot of sense. But over time as device performance increased, it became feasible even for enterprises to consolidate functions into a single device. This doesn’t mean many enterprises tried this, but they had the option.
So why hasn’t the large enterprise embraced UTM? It comes down to predictable factors we see impacting enterprise technology adoption in general:
- Branding: UTM was perceived as a SMB technology, so many enterprise snobs didn’t want anything to do with it. Why pay $2,500 for a box when you can pay $50,000 to make a statement about being one of the big boys? Of course, notwithstanding the category name, every vendor brought a multi-function security gateway to market. They realize ‘UTM’ could be a liability so they use different names for people who don’t want to use the same gear as the great unwashed.
- Performance Perception: Again, given the SMB heritage of UTM, enterprise network security players could easily paint UTM as low-performance, and customers believed them. To be clear, the UTM-centric vendors didn’t help here pushing their boxes into use cases where they couldn’t be successful, demonstrating they weren’t always suitable. If you try to do high-speed firewall, IDS/IPS, and anti-spam with thousands of rules, all in the same box, it’s not going to work well. Hell, even standalone devices use load balancing techniques to manage high volumes, but the perception of enterprise customers was that UTM couldn’t scale. And we all know that perception is reality.
- Single Point of Failure: If the box goes down you are owned, right? Well, yes – or completely dead in the water – you might get to choose which. Many enterprises remain unwilling to put all their eggs in one basket, even with high availability configurations and the like. As fans of layered security we don’t blame folks for thinking this way, but understand that you can deploy a set of multi-function gateways to address the issue. But when you are looking for excuses not to do something, you can always find at least one.
- Specialization: The complexity of large enterprise environments demands lots of resources, and they resources tend to be specialized in the operations of one specific device. So you’ll have a firewall jockey, an IDS/IPS guru, and an anti-spam queen. If you have all those capabilities in a single box, what does that do for the job security of all three? To be clear every UTM device supports role-based management so administrators can have control only over the functions in their area, but it’s easier for security folks to justify their existence if they have a dedicated box/function to manage. Yes, this boils down to politics, but we all know political machinations have killed more than a handful of emerging technologies.
- Pricing: There is no reason you can’t get a multi-function security device and use it as a standalone device. You can get a UTM and run it like a firewall. Really. But to date, the enterprise pricing of these UTM devices made that unattractive for most organizations. Again, a clear case of vendors not helping themselves. So we’d like to see more of a smorgasbord pricing model, where you buy the modules you need. Yes, some of the vendors (especially ones selling software on commodity hardware) are there. But their inclination is to nickel and dime the customer, charging too much for each module, so enterprises start to lose the idea that multi-function devices will actually save money.
Ultimately these factors will not stop the multi-function security device juggernaut from continuing to collapse more functions into the perimeter gateway. Vendors changed the branding to avoid calling it UTM – even though it is. The devices have increased performance with new chips and updated architectures. And even the political stuff works out over time due to economic pressure to increase operational efficiency.
So the conclusion we draw is that consolidation of network security functions is inevitable, even in the large enterprise. But we aren’t religious about UTM vs. standalone devices. All we care about is seeing the right set of security controls are implemented in the most effective means to protect critical information. We don’t expect standalone IDS/IPS devices to go away any time soon. And much of the content filtering (email and web) is moving to cloud-based services. We believe this is a very positive trend. These new abilities of the enterprise firewall give us more flexibility.
That’s right, we still believe (strongly) in defense in depth. So having an IDS/IPS sitting behind an application aware firewall isn’t a bad thing. Attacks change every day and sometimes it’s best to look for a specific issue. Let’s use a battle analogy – if we have a sniper (in the form of IDS/IPS) sitting behind the moat (firewall) looking for a certain individual (the new attack), there is nothing wrong with that. If we want to provision some perimeter security in the cloud, and have a cleaner stream of traffic hitting your network, that’s all good. If you want to maintain separate devices at HQ and larger regional locations, while integrating functions in small offices and branches, or maybe even running network security in a virtual machine, you can.
And that’s really the point. For a long time, we security folks have been building security architectures based on what the devices could do, not what’s appropriate (or necessary) to protect information assets. Having the ability to provision the security you need where you need it is exactly what we’ve been looking for? All these technologies remain relevant. Even if enterprises fully embrace application awareness on the enterprise firewall – and they will – there will still be plenty of boxes at your perimeter. So don’t go redecorating your 19” racks quite yet. They’ll still be full for a while…
Next we’ll finish up the series by talking specifically about the selection process.
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