UTM heads for larger market in Asia

Unified threat management (UTM) devices are gaining acceptance by larger enterprises in Asia, according to security vendors in the region.

Jens Andreassen, vice president of Asia-Pacific sales at Fortinet, told ZDNet Asia in a recent interview that the company is now seeing breakthrough in the higher-priced segment, a contrast to several years earlier, when UTM or all-in-one security appliances appealed mainly to small and midsize businesses (SMBs).

"We're [now] seeing huge adoption by the high-end market," said Andreassen, referring to the Asian region. The change, he explained, is due to a combination of factors, including the maturing of all-in-one security technology and the refresh cycles of larger enterprises.

According to Fortinet, it is enjoying success in the upper price bands for markets such as China, India, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. Vertical industries that have higher adoption levels include financial, government and telco.

Other UTM vendors such as 3Com and Check Point also note an upward trend in adoption by large enterprises.

Pointing to estimates by analyst IDC, 3Com's technical director for the Asia-Pacific region Orcun Tezel said in an e-mail that UTM will account for nearly 50 percent of the overall network security market by 2011.

"Larger enterprises are indeed moving to large scale UTM deployments across regional networks as it gives the immediate benefit of raising the secure posture of the entire infrastructure," said Tezel. "The consolidation also offers the added benefit of standardizing the management and control of multiple security services like VPN (virtual private networks), firewall, and antivirus."

Tezel noted that 3Com recently rolled out 298 X-family devices and two management appliances in a logistics company, in what it believes to be the largest UTM deployment in Asia.

"What will start to drive greater adoption is the integration of more essential security services under the UTM umbrella like network access control (NAC), anti-malware and advanced security event and incident response," said Tezel. "3Com expects that UTM systems will [also] start to address the next wave of enterprise security vulnerability emerging from social media and Web 2.0 platforms."

Kelvin Lim, region manager for Asean at Check Point, noted that the company has been receiving more enquiries on UTM products over the past year. However, extremely large enterprises are not investing in UTM technology as "most of them have existing point solutions", he added.

Yet, with its ability to "simplify the overall security solution despite the growing scope and rising complexity of the security problem", UTM will likely gain traction beyond the SMB space, said Lim.

"As UTM evolves into the next generation and the core features are expanded, it is very likely that enterprises will begin to view them as a viable option for a complete security solution," he said.