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On premise and UTM security appliances often offer "all in one" protection. When in fact, most appliances sized for the mid-market fail to provide the essentials layers of security to adequately protect your clients.
If you are using or planning to use an on-premise security appliance to keep your customers safe from cyberthreats, here are a few tips:
There Will Be Gaps
The appliance will most likely lack one or more critical features you need to protect small and medium businesses. The most common feature gaps are usually patch management, identity/access management, and endpoint protection, but there are other niche features that will be missing from your appliance.
Most IT service providers fill these gaps with one or more point solutions that offer additional layers of security. These point solutions add more time to maintenance in the form of a bigger to-do list for your already-busy-enough IT team.
Even if some of these critical features are included with your UTM appliance, the definitions files, critical security updates, and firmware updates must be done regularly in order to ensure full protection.
Gaps Cost Money and Time
Solving one problem with a point solution is sub-par in many ways.
First, your technology stack either didn't scale to support you, or didn't have an adequate feature set to do its job. Second, now you've got another piece of technology helping to augment your security, with its own contract, support/maintenance bill, and other associated costs. Most importantly, point solutions just make the lives of your IT staff more complex, and their jobs can be very difficult already.
Cybersecurity can become a blind spot due to inadequate resources, and everyone should strive to make their security stack as simple as possible, while still offering well-rounded protection. Taking on point solutions to fill gaps is a hard choice in favor of more complexity and cost.
The Truth: More Scalable and Affordable Solutions Already Exist
Today's cloud-first world requires a cloud-first, scalable delivery model. The perimeter defense model simply does not offer elasticity, affordability, or reliable feature upgrades without buying new hardware.
Cloud-based security platforms such as Avast Business CloudCare can help your business free themselves from their UTM security appliances by offering the following:
- Actual "all in one" security: Endpoint, network, firewall, and patch management in a single delivery platform
- Unlimited scalability: Cloud-based services will sell you more licenses when you open a new office or your business grows, eliminating the need to buy more hardware
- Vastly lower costs: The infrastructure costs of an appliance-first security strategy can add up quickly - remember to review our previous post about those hidden costs
The 5 Other Reasons your UTM Security Appliance Might Be Harming Your Business
Lack of features and scalability is only one of six things your appliance vendor probably isn't talking to you about. In our next blog, we're going to talk more about why security lists and definitions are so important, and how much faster (or slower) appliances are at updating those lists!
If you'd like to learn more about these hidden costs and risks, have a look at our resource center which includes our latest webinar and e-book content:
