Differences Between UTM Systems and Firewalls

Historically, Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) appliances were designed to deliver a very specific set of security services – firewalling, IPS, and URL filtering. Anything that consolidated more than those services was commonly referred to as a Unified Threat Management (UTM) appliance. Today, however, we see significant blending of these two markets and products. The performance gap has disappeared and solutions marketed as NGFW appliances are being released with the same security services once unique to offerings marketed as UTM appliances. So, if NGFW and UTM appliances are the same when it comes to security and performance, what is the difference?

UTM appliances provide out-of-the-box policies, management, and reporting tools designed for ease of deployment and ongoing management while NGFW appliances cater to organizations that wish to customize their security policies and prefer manual reporting and management techniques. Neither approach is wrong, however, many organizations do not have the time, resources, or security expertise required to manually build security policy and manage a variety of disparate appliances. UTM solutions give those organization the same enterprise-grade security without the extra layer of management. This is particularly useful for small, midsize, or widely distributed organizations that typically don’t have dedicated security or IT teams.

It has been long debated if one appliance that centralizes a variety of network security tasks could ever compete with the performance of dedicated point solutions. Not only is the answer yes, but the performance of some UTM appliances, with all security engines running, outperform many dedicated NGFW point solutions.

As such, there is not a static definition of what services should be considered standard within a UTM appliance. Fueling the confusion for end-users, vendors all take a slightly varied approach when it comes to pricing and packaging. Be on the look out of a la cart pricing for each service and for locked functionality within management platforms that quickly raise deployment costs. However, every Firebox can be purchased as a standalone NGFW appliance as well, however, we never recommend the deployment of an NGFW without other security mechanisms in place. The best approach to security is a layered approach.

Many users tend to use these two terms in a sense like NGFW and UTM.

UTM firewall enhances data protection by giving you complete control over network security in multiple ways.

The main function of the UTM firewall is to follow some rules to detect unwanted external threats.

UTM Firewalls are initially installed on individual devices and work as soon as they detect potential external threats.

Firewalls are primarily used for small network systems.

The UTM Firewalls works in Flow based inception and Proxy based inception.

All security features are centralized in a single product, so you can highlight performance issues to the limits of your UTM firewall.

Next Generation Firewalls are one of the most important defenses for businesses to combat digital threats.

NGFW are connected to antimalware products can protect your business from cyberattacks and virus infections.

Next Generation Firewall aims to use IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) and DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) to filter unwanted external malicious content.

It provides organizations with several benefits such as intrusion prevention, network visibility and application control.

NGFW’s major contribution lies in technological advances arising from deep packet inspection and visibility of applications, regardless of protocol and port.

The boundary between the two has become very blurry over the years.

IT experts often referred to UTM firewalls as NextGen firewalls or vice versa, and did not make this more explicit.

It is quite Evident is that all the security functions of UTM are Integrated in NGFW with more advanced protocols.

A NGFW should not be confused with a stand-alone network intrusion prevention system (IPS), which includes a commodity or non enterprise firewall, or a firewall and IPS in the same appliance that are not closely integrated.

They are deep packet inspection firewalls that go beyond port / protocol scanning and blocking to add application-level inspection, intrusion prevention, and intelligence outside the firewall.

On the other hand UTM has several different weaknesses that can be exploited by hackers.

The most prominent weaknesses that UTMs suffer from are latest updates, area limitations, day one security factors, deep packet filtering, geo-locations identifiers, performance constraints, single point of failure etc.

NGFW is an all-in-one UTM virtual appliance which provides a far-reaching suite of boundary and network security features.

Although some people use the terms interchangeably, there are key differences.

next-generation firewalls are typically defined as firewalls enhanced with intrusion prevention and application intelligence.

On the other hand, UTM systems include those features—plus additional technologies such as email security, URL filtering, wireless security, web application firewalls and virtual private networks (VPNs).

In this view, UTM systems include NGFWs as components.