A unified threat management system is defined as a single security solution or appliance that offers multiple security functions at a single point on the network.
Because the range of possible threats to enterprise network security is so diverse today, a UTM appliance offers the ability to unify multiple types of threat protection including anti-spyware, antivirus, anti-spam, intrusion detection and prevention, network firewall, content filtering and leak prevention.
In this article, we explain what Unified Threat Management (UTM) is, its features, software vendor evaluation parameters, and the top 10 software in 2021.
Table of Contents
- What is a Unified Threat Management (UTM) System?
- Top 10 UTM Software Vendor Evaluation Parameters
- Top 10 Unified Threat Management Software – Feature Comparison Guide
What is a Unified Threat Management (UTM) System?
A unified threat management system is defined as a single security solution or appliance that offers multiple security functions at a single point on the network.
It is a single security solution that offers multiple security functions via a single point on the network.
The most common features of UTM are:
- Firewall (all UTM apps)
- URL filtering
- IPS
- IPsec, SSL and VPN
- Web antivirus
- User and application control
- Quality of service (QoS)
- Anti-spam
Unified threat management software or security appliances can be a cloud-based service or a virtual appliance, and in addition to the threat protection functionalities, also offers services like network address translation (NAT), remote routing, next-generation firewalls (NGFW), secure email and web gateways, intrusion prevention system (IPS), WAN connectivity and VPN (virtual private network) support. The great advantage of UTM is that an organization doesn’t have to work with multiple threat protection software vendors. With a UTM, it’s all under one roof, supported by a single IT team, and run via one console.
The UTM market is projected to reach $11.17 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 13.41%, making it the largest and fastest-growing market according to the Verified Market Research reportOpens a new window . In the guide, we’ll define unified threat management, identify key UTM vendor evaluation parameters and cover the top ten unified threat management software vendors making a mark in 2021. We include a detailed analysis of the key features and benefits that each software offers, to help you build a shortlist of best-fit vendors.
Top 10 UTM Software Vendor Evaluation Parameters
Now that we have understood what UTM is, let us take a look at the top 10 UTM software vendors.
As each vendor uses a slightly different set of components in the threat management software, so it’s vital for buyers to evaluate unified threat management software vendors on a set of parameters based on their own unique needs, priorities and business context.
However, a common framework to evaluate UTM vendors would include asking some central questions to the vendor.
Here are the top 10 questions to ask while you are evaluating a unified threat management software:
Top 10 UTM Software Vendor Evaluation Parameters
1. Do they have all the features and functionalities on your must-have list?
While features can be many, it is important that you identify the scope of threat management offered by the service. Some vendors call themselves next-gen firewalls, and some call themselves security appliances, while others go by UTMs. It is important to understand the reason behind how a vendor chooses to describe themselves.
2. Do they specialize in your high-priority or mission-critical use-cases?
Depending on what’s important to you, you may be interested in vendors who are specialized in:
a. Firewall or intrusion prevention system (IPS) or virtual private network
b. Secure web gateway security such as URL filtering and web antivirus
c. Messaging security like mail antivirus, anti-spam
3. Are they used by others in your industry and do they offer sufficient support expertise to companies of your nature?
Don’t forget to read or ask for reviews by current and past users. Also, check if they offer free demos and trials. If they are able to provide performance benchmarks they have achieved with others in your vertical or industry, it helps make a more informed choice.
4. Are they known for serving organizations of your size – for example, are a majority of their clients enterprise users or SMB users?
Are they able to offer the usage analytics and reporting needed for IT teams to make informed decisions on security and threat management?
5. What kind of security and risk mitigation is built into the system?
Do they offer adequate support, backup, recovery and redundancies?
6. What deployment models do the vendors offer?
Subscription or license? Cloud or on-premise? What are the pros and cons of each model in your context? For example, smaller and growing organizations tend to prefer cloud-based SaaS solutions due to the lower costs, higher flexibility and insignificant investment in capex it demands.
7. What are the bandwidth requirements of the solution?
Will it work in every geography across your network?
8. Can they scale with you?
As your organization grows, you may require a quick scaleup across multiple networks, geographies or devices.
9. Ease of deployment and use: how complex is the deployment and installation process?
Can IT pros easily access the console and monitor everything seamlessly? How much training would be required?
10. How affordable are the rates and how flexible are the payment options for you?
Are you able to scale down without obligations? Are there any hidden costs? Will it require additional resources to be hired to manage and operate the solution
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Top 10 Unified Threat Management Software Vendors: Feature Comparisons
With the growth in the range and diversity of cyber-attacks, and increasingly stringent IT regulatory requirements, UTM solutions have gained traction across organizations of all sizes and across all industries. No business is immune from threats and almost every system would have some vulnerabilities. The internet is a double-edged sword for businesses. It’s necessary to reach and engage potential and existing customers over digital platforms and channels, but it also exposes you to a persistent array of network-based threats.
Here is a listing of the top 10 UTM appliances we have identified as market leaders. To create this list, we analyzed multiple vendors and compared them to the most significant and critical set of UTM appliance features.
Disclaimer: The listings are based on publicly available information and include vendor websites that serve mid-to-large enterprises. Readers are advised to conduct their own final research so as to ensure the best fit for their unique organizational needs.
Here is the alphabetical listing of the top 10 UTM Solution Providers in 2021:
1. Alert Logic Threat Manager
Alert Logic Threat Manager is the perfect network intrusion detection system (IDS) and vulnerability management solution for cloud as well as hybrid environments. It’s a single managed security-as-a-service software that protects your hybrid infrastructure, apps, and cloud workloads.
It helps:
- To identify suspicious activities in network traffic
- Reduce the overall attack surface by hiding visibility into vulnerabilities across all layers of your application stack
- Streamline reporting of assessment results to meet compliance requirements
- Round the clock monitoring by GIAC-certified securing analysts looking for threats across the environment
Key Features and Benefits
- Find threats with threat manager and active watch
- Full stack assessment and analysis
- Verified incident report
- 24 by 7 by 365 expert monitoring
- Live notifications and help within 15 minutes of high severity incidents
- Enhances vulnerability management maturity
- Use the customizable dashboard and automated reporting to:
- Demonstrate progress
- Monitor vulnerability status of your environments, groups, service, specific hosts and zones
- Maintains compliance faster and at lower costs
- Automates delivery of tailored reports for HIPAA, PCI, and SOX compliance
- Dashboard to view compliance status and prioritized list of actions required to maintain compliance
- Ready to use services
- Pre-built automated deployment helps you get up and running rapidly
2. Azure Security Center
Microsoft’s Azure Security Center is a UTM (unified threat management) software that strengthens the security posture of data centers. It offers advanced threat protection across the hybrid workloads in the cloud as well as premises.
Azure security center uses machine learning to process trillions of signals across Microsoft services and systems, and alerts systems of threats to all environments including remote desktop protocol (RDP), brute-force attacks and SQL injections, along with actionable recommendations for mitigating these threats.
Key features and benefits:
- With Azure Security Center, security teams can extend threat protection to on-premises VMs.
- Security teams can also connect to existing tools and processes such as security information and event management (SIEM).
- Azure Security Center enables the teams with a unified view across hybrid cloud workloads.
Learn More: Cybersecurity Risks Businesses Face in the Wake of COVID-19Opens a new window
3. Barracuda
Barracuda delivers cloud-enabled, enterprise-grade security solutions spanning email, networks, data and applications that grow and adapt with the customers’ journey. Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is a suite of physical, virtual, and cloud-based appliances that secure network infrastructure. The solution also provides scalable, centralized management coupled with an advanced security analytics platform.
With network expansions leading to new security concerns amid the pandemic, Barracuda’s solution is pegged as the right fit for large multi-site enterprises and organizations with distributed network infrastructure.
Key Features and Benefits:
Barracuda CloudGen Firewall provides intrusion prevention, web filtering, advanced threat and malware protection, antispam, and full-fledged network access control.
- The solution increases overall network availability and also delivers WAN optimization capabilities
- It is purpose-built for dispersed networks and cloud environments and makes cloud deployment easy with APIs
- The solution enables easy roll-out to remote sites with that lack IT personnel
4. Change Tracker Gen7
The Change Tracker Gen 7 UTM software provides fundamental and critical cybersecurity threat detection and prevention. It leverages security best practices in integrity assurance and system configuration that are combined with a comprehensive and intelligent change control solution.
The change tracker makes sure your IT systems stay secure, known and compliant at all times. It includes context-based File Integrity Monitoring and File Whitelisting that ensures any change activity is validated and analyzed automatically.
Key Features and Benefits
- It automates CIS Controls: NTT Change Tracker enables you to:
- Spot cyber threats
- Identify any suspicious changes
- Adjusts secure baseline in real-time
- A simple point and click helps you approve all changes to the authorized baseline
- Breach Detection and Prevention
- It identifies suspicious activities with its highly sophisticated contextual change control that spots security breaches
- It makes sure all IT assets are secure at all times by using recommended security and configuration settings along with real-time configuration drift and system vulnerability management
- Real-time Monitoring
- It analyzes small changes intelligently in real-time with:
- Large repository of whitelisted files
- Automated planned change rules to reduce change noise significantly and deliver a true FIM solution
- Uninterrupted Compliance Monitoring
- Provide comprehensive customized or pre-built reports to offer vital evidence to management, auditors, and security staff
- System Hardening and vulnerability management
- Continuous and real-time clear configuration guidance and remediation help minimize the attack surface
- It’s based on CIS and other standard benchmarks in the industry for system hardening and vulnerability mitigation guidance
5. Core Insight Enterprise
Core Insight 5.0 prioritizes organization-wide vulnerability initiatives by consolidating multiple scans across vendors while simulating attacks and matching known exploits. It offers additional attack intelligence features that include a centralized asset store to:
- Consolidate and normalize huge amounts of vulnerability data
- Flexible reporting to aid customization and granular analysis
- Interactive attack paths that help in modeling potential threat scenarios rapidly
Key Features & Benefits
- Leverages Graph Technology
- It uses graph technology of nodes and edges, to enable rapid modeling of an entire network from potential breaches.
- It uses systems, network topologies and vulnerabilities to determine security-based associations of vulnerable systems
- Enhanced Scalability and Analytics
- Core Insight campaigns can hold larger data sets enabling security teams to automate the weakness identification process in corporate networks
- By continuously running campaigns, Chief Information Security Officers can track security trends over days, weeks or months
- Improved Usability
- The user interface comes with enhancements that let users apply the Core Insights attack strategy along with attack path analytics
- Interactive analytics tab allows users to focus on problem areas and schedule automated campaigns
- One-click campaigns and real-time exploit matching
- The exploit matching from Core Insight yields immediate results without configuring campaigns
- When attack strategies are applied to these results, security teams can further reduce the number of vulnerabilities that can then be prioritized for remediation
- Users can create automated campaigns in a single click to enable security teams to effectively evaluate measurable changes in the security status
Learn More: How to Assess and Manage Third-Party RiskOpens a new window
6. Darktrace
The enterprise immune system from Darktrace is an AI-enabled self-learning cyber technology that detects insider threats and novel attacks at an early stage.
It is modeled on the human immune system and learns and understands self for everyone and everything in the business. Thus, it is capable of spotting subtle signals of an advanced attack without being dependent on rules, signatures or prior assumptions.
Key Features and Benefits
This next-generation unified threat management software uses unsupervised machine learning and artificial intelligence to understand your organization. It observes your devices, users, workflows and cloud containers, to learn on the job what’s normal for your organization.
Darktrace protects across the enterprise and provides a unified view of their entire digital estate to tackle emerging threats swiftly.
- Learns continuously and adapts in the light of new evidence
- Detects and responds to attacks early
- Provides complete visibility across multi-cloud, hybrid, and IoT infrastructure
- Can be installed just within an hour, and requires no manual configuration or tuning
7. F-Secure
F-Secure business suite is specially designed to simplify the demanding security needs of today’s companies. It combines advanced technology with expertise, cutting-edge features and on-site control to offer the best continuous protection for your organization.
F-secure has also received the best protection award from AV-Test six times in a row. It offers effective prevention of cyber threats and covers endpoints and gateways, email, servers, and other communication channels.
Key Features and Benefits
It is a complete protection bundle that provides:
- Best protection level from new, emerging threats and known vulnerabilities
- Layered protection to assets from the gateway to the endpoint
- Reduces workload by automating daily tasks
- Advanced management features that allow complete control over the organization’s IT security
- Scalable and flexible package that offers transparent licensing for organizations of all sizes
- It features Botnet Blocker that stops external control of compromised assets
- Connection control boosts security for sensitive activities such as online banking
8. Kerio Control
Kerio Control is a unified threat management software that features intrusion prevention, activity reporting, content filtering, bandwidth management, and VPN. It’s the next-gen firewall that preserves the integrity of your servers with its deep packet inspection and advanced network routing capabilities.
Key Features and Benefits
- It helps create outbound and inbound traffic policies, restricting communication by a specific application, URL, content strategy, traffic type and time of the day
- The IPS from Kerio Control adds a transparent network protection layer, with snort-based behavior analysis, and an updated database of blacklisted IPs and rules from emerging threats
- Integrated advanced gateway antivirus prevents worms, viruses, spyware, trojans from entering your network
- The optional antivirus service scans FTP as well as web traffic, email downloads and attachments, and automatically updates itself with the latest virus definitions
- The web content and application filtering feature protects the network and amplifies user productivity by limiting user access to inappropriate or dangerous sites
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9. Qualys
Qualys identifies all known and unknown assets on the global hybrid IT automatically, whether it is on-premise, cloud, endpoints, mobile, OT or IoT. It offers complete inventory which is enriched with details like vendor lifecycle management.
It analyzes misconfigurations and threats in real-time with six-sigma accuracy. It leverages the newest threat intelligence, advanced correlation and machine learning to automatically prioritize potential threats and riskiest vulnerabilities on the most critical assets. Thus, it reduces thousands of vulnerabilities to the few hundred that matter the most.
Key Features and Benefits
- It provides instant visibility and control over your global IT assets at an incredible speed and scale
- The platform eliminates false positives and consistently exceeds the Six Sigma accuracy of 99.99966%
- The cloud platform offers end-to-end solutions for IT, compliance and security
- It helps in drastic cost reductions for threat management across large enterprise networks
10. Tripwire Enterprise
Tripwire provides complete control over your IT environment with superior change intelligence. It’s an industry-leading security configuration management solution that responds to all cyber threats in real-time while preventing future attacks.
Tripwire Enterprise provides you complete visibility into any unplanned change on your network. It offers granular endpoint intelligence for policy compliance and threat detections with high value, low volume change alerts.
Features and Benefits
- Tripwire enables real-time detection by shortening the time taken to catch threats, thereby limiting damage from anomalies, threats, and suspicious changes.
- It gives deep visibility into the security system state and strengthens the security posture
- It provides extensive app integrations to bridge the gap between IT and security
Wrap Up
UTM tools are important for any security team’s arsenal. However, there is a long list of vendors to choose from. We hope the unified threat management reviews covered above will help you determine which UTM appliance could make it to your shortlist. Vendors showcase a wide array of features across on-premise, cloud, or hybrid (physical or virtual appliance) environments. Aside from the standard IDS/IPS, firewall, and advanced threat protection capabilities, some of these also offer centralized management and content filtering capabilities, as well as antivirus and malware protection. Increasingly, UTMs are also leveraging advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning to offer intelligent and predictive threat management capabilities, as well as real-time threat monitoring capabilities.
Are there other unified threat management applications you feel should be included in our list? Which features do you consider must-haves in a UTM solution? Comment and let us know on FacebookOpens a new window , LinkedInOpens a new window and TwitterOpens a new window !