The IT Guide for a Successful Unified Threat Management Approach

Security teams commonly struggle with alert overload and tool sprawl. Organizations that have deployed numerous standalone security solutions expend significant resources monitoring and managing these tools and can experience security and visibility gaps due to a reliance on manual processes to aggregate data and remediate security incidents.

What is Unified Threat Management?

Unified Threat Management is a security solution that integrates multiple protection features into a single platform. It provides comprehensive defense against a variety of threats by combining firewall, intrusion prevention, antivirus, content filtering, and anti-spam capabilities. This all-in-one approach simplifies security management and ensures a high level of protection for your network.

Common Features of Unified Threat Management

UTM solutions integrate several key security capabilities into a single solution. The most common features that UTM tools offer include the following:

Integrated Firewall

A network firewall is the backbone of an organization’s security architecture, defining a clear boundary between the protected internal network and the public Internet. Firewalls determine what traffic is allowed to enter and leave the internal network based on various factors, including source and destination IP addresses and ports.

Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)

Intrusion prevention systems use a combination of signature and anomaly detection to identify unusual and suspicious activities and network traffic. An IPS solution can identify phishing, malware, command and control traffic, and can drop malicious traffic, preventing it from reaching its intended destination.

Antivirus and Anti-Malware Protection

Antivirus and antimalware solutions are designed to identify a range of potential malware, such as ransomware, viruses, trojans, and infostealers. If detected, the malware may be automatically removed from the infected system or quarantined for later review.

Web Filtering

Web filtering blocks browsing to websites that are known to be malicious or non-compliant with corporate policies. This is accomplished by examining requested URLs and checking them against lists of known malicious sites, reputation scores, and disallowed sites (such as social media).

Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

Data loss prevention (DLP) solutions attempt to identify and block sensitive information from being leaked outside the organization’s control. This includes scanning outbound data for common forms of sensitive data, such as government ID numbers, email addresses, etc.

Email Security

Email security solutions examine inbound and outbound email for potential threats. This includes blocking spam, phishing, and malware attacks.

Centralized Management Console

A centralized management console is one of the main benefits of UTM since it provides simplified security visibility and management. By eliminating context switching and the need to manage multiple tools, this console improves security teams’ efficiency and can eliminate visibility gaps.

Benefits of a Unified Threat Management Approach

A UTM approach to security offers several benefits for an organization, including:

• Cost Savings: UTM bundles several key security capabilities into a single solution. This may reduce the overall cost of these capabilities and decrease operational expenditure (OpEx) by reducing management overhead and helping to eliminate visibility gaps that lead to security breaches.
• Improved Security Visibility: UTM provides a single dashboard that offers visibility into several key security capabilities. By eliminating standalone dashboards for various tools, UTM enhances security teams’ visibility into their infrastructure and risk exposure.
• Simplified Management: Centralized dashboards also simplify the management of an organization’s security architecture. With UTM, security teams have a single tool to configure, manage, and monitor rather than several.
• Enhanced Compliance: UTM offers many of the key security controls and capabilities needed for regulatory compliance within a single package. Additionally, enhanced security visibility and management reduce the risk of compliance gaps and security incidents.

Best Practices for a Unified Threat Management Strategy

Some best practices for a UTM strategy include:

• Regular Updates: Security solutions commonly require regular updates to perform at their best. Applying updates promptly after they become available helps to protect the organization against the latest threats.
• Active Monitoring: Some security solutions, like IDS, are designed to alert security personnel to threats, triggering incident response. Continuous monitoring is essential for rapid incident detection and remediation.
• Periodic Audits: UTM solutions incorporate a range of security functions, but they need to be configured correctly and lack some security capabilities. Periodic audits help to identify and address any security gaps.
• Scalability: A UTM solution is responsible for protecting the enterprise against several potential threats. A UTM tool should have the scalability required to support the business during peak load and potential growth.

These best practices can be achieved with a cloud-based security service such as that found within Cato’s SASE service. 

Bullet-Proof Unified Threat Management with Cato Networks

The goal of UTM is to improve an organization’s security visibility, control, and efficiency through centralized security management. While UTM can be deployed as an appliance, there are strong advantages to cloud delivery, including scalability, avoiding the need to manually patch and upgrade, and simpler management.  

The Cato SASE Cloud Platform includes SSE 360, a fully cloud-native converged security stack. Built on Cato’s Single Pass Cloud Engine (SPACE), SSE 360 incorporates key security capabilities, including zero trust and network segmentation (FWaaS), application and data protection (CASB, DLP, ZTNA), and threat prevention (SWG, IPS, NGAM, DNS Security, RBI).

Like UTM, Cato SASE cloud enhances security efficiency and effectiveness by eliminating standalone solutions that require individual sizing, patching, upgrading, and management. Instead, all enterprise traffic is decrypted, inspected, and secured by a single solution, and security teams can centrally monitor and manage security policies and events within the self-service Cato Management Application.

To learn more about enhancing your network security and performance with Cato SASE Cloud, book a demo.