In light of the economic slowdown, there is greater impetus to leverage on technology convergence as a means to reduce TCO (total cost of ownership).
In the process, there is also greater focus being cast onto the unified threat management (UTM) platform, especially with regards to the excellent value proposition it brings to the security arena against the backdrop of an increasingly challenging business environment.
Says Amy Thomas, Fortinet Product Manager at Zycko, official distributor of Fortinet security solutions: “Indeed, many enterprises are beginning to appreciate the benefits brought about by a UTM solution, be it the economical savings offered by multiple technologies converged on a single platform, or the ease of control and administration catered for by a single management console. The global economic downturn has made the advantages of deploying a UTM more pronounced, with the solution becoming a more acceptable security form factor among the large enterprises - a far cry from its beginnings as a purely SME-centric product.”
However, misgivings still exist pertaining to the platform's ability in managing scalability and integration challenges, issues which have plagued the UTM segment from the beginning and which are expected to intensify with more convergence modules.
The introduction of the FortiOS 4.0 platform by Fortinet has cast the spotlight on the evolution of the UTM solution platform. Being one of the pioneer vendors in the segment, Fortinet has once again taken the bold step of expanding the definition of UTM and incorporating its notion of technology convergence into it. In particular, its foray into non-security related technologies such as WAN optimisation is going to broaden customer perceptions towards the multitude of possibilities associated with an integrated solution platform, not to mention the ability to mix-and-match and customise solutions in accordance with each customer's unique needs.
In addition, Fortinet essentially gathered all the current common customer grouses pertaining to data leakage, remote access and application performance, and added them into the mix during the development of the new OS platform. The result is a platform that not only enables data leakage protection (DLP) and SSL inspection capabilities on top of the existing security arsenal, but also the much sought-after WAN optimisation and application control.
The marriage of WAN optimisation technology with the UTM platform is particularly significant considering the need for WAN optimisation to be deployed symmetrically across various sites, as well as the growing prevalence of UTMs in driving site-to-site security across head and branch offices.
Nonetheless, the perception of Fortinet as a security specialist, rather than an application-centric vendor, is a challenge that the vendor needs to overcome to position itself to enterprises increasingly reliant on applications to run business processes. Similarly, concerns among the large enterprises regarding the robustness and scalability of the UTM in serving their needs will have to be allayed first before a UTM-based WAN optimisation solution makes its mark in that horizontal segment.
With this latest attempt at redefining the borders of the UTM solution, the future looks certain to move rapidly towards technology convergence. In fact, in light of how the definition of a UTM is going to vastly change with Fortinet's latest innovation, the notion of 'threat management' is probably too narrow a term to encapsulate the technological evolution and potential that an integrated solution platform is going to offer in the long run.
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