Jon Kuhn, SonicWall's product line director, pointed out that enterprises in the region, particularly small-sized companies, do not have very effective means to deal with increasingly frequent virus attacks.
"In Southeast Asia, you have about 95 percent of SMBs using older firewall technology and data packet inspection technology, which do not look at all the traffic that's coming in and out of the network; they actually only inspect 2 percent of the traffic."
Kuhn also noted that UTM systems can help monitor and increase employee productivity. As technology becomes more pervasive in an organization, he said, business owners concerned with how much time their employees spend on the Internet and the Web sites they visit, can get some clear answers.
"By putting in UTM, you can gather a lot more intelligence--now that you're inspecting a lot more traffic--as to what employees are doing…to raise productivity and the efficiency of people," he explained.
Appeal of pure-play appliances
Despite its benefits, integrated security appliances are unlikely to eliminate the need for best-of-breed products, security vendors say.
Liran Eshel, chief executive officer of Check Point-subsidiary SofaWare Technologies, likened it to the home entertainment systems market, where there will always be customers who prefer all-in-one systems while others want multiple, separate systems.
"[The trend of doing away with single appliances] will be true for small businesses because they cannot afford the overheads of integrating and managing multiple security systems," said Eshel. "Larger enterprises, on the other hand, would always like to keep the option of multiple systems for their main office networks."
Said TippingPoint's Low: "Some businesses may have existing [standalone] products that they have no reason to get rid of, so to buy integrated appliances, they have to justify [the cost] to their management."
IDC's Low added that large enterprises that opt for dedicated appliances from best-of-breed vendors would likely be "concerned about the performance of UTM solutions for enterprise-wide protection".
SonicWall's Kuhn noted that regardless of the type of security appliances used, companies should remember to pay as much, if not more, attention to the security of their internal networks, instead of focusing solely on stopping external attacks from entering the corporate environment.
The Zotob episode was a good learning experience, he said, adding that the attacks spread as a result of businesses "not looking at their internal security as well as their external security".
"Security is not just about putting a brick wall between you and the Internet, but also attending to the security risks that are inherent in the internal networks," said Kuhn.
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