Unified Threat Management systems have existed since 2004, they take the firewall and many security services ie. (Intrusion prevention system (IPS), Email protection (antivirus, antispam, repudiation, smtp and pop3 proxy), Web protection (antivirus, anti-malware, repudiation), plus there can be many more services depending on the vendor.
While the firewall was the standard for border protection of your network, with the use of Network Address Translation (NAT) is used to hide your network and provide the use of private IP address. Firewall rules allowed controlling the flow of data and access to your network, while what I call hide and block worked, many ways were found to bypass this protection. Many venders created specific pieces of equipment to help protect from these new threats, you could with one device to protect web browsing, another to protect email, a reverse proxy to protect and allow access to web-servers, and another to provide Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). A large company could end up with five or six pieces of equipment costing tens of thousands of dollars to protect their users..
The UTM system provides these services in a single box, which can be a dedicated hardware appliance or software that can turn a PC or Server into an appliance, some vendors supply virtual appliances. While the larger appliances can still cost tens of thousands of dollars, there are units for small business that are under one thousand dollars. For the home user this might be more than the budget can afford, but there are versions for the home user that are open source or licensed for home use for free.
Whether a large company or a home user protecting your data is important and you should have the best protection available. With as much as people depend on the internet from email to banking to shopping to working from home, every thing that you can do to prevent loosing your data or identity should be done.
Don’t get me wrong the UTM is not the be all end all in protection, you still need to have security in depth to protect your systems, adding a good protection suite sometimes called Internet Security, they usually have antivirus, malware protection, firewall, email protection. This should be a different antivirus solution than what runs on your UTM. And if you run a home server a different solution should be installed, this helps if one system misses a threat the other will catch it. (A note: I have had virus/malware get past my system.)
For Home users that generally have a dynamic IP address from their ISP, this adds to their protection as the IP address are generally refreshed and not tied specifically to their system. My system has a static IP address and is regularly probed by cyber criminals that are temping to compromise my system.
I use Sophos UTM which was formerly Astaro UTM, and have used it for about four years now. I find it an excellent solution whether you’re a home user or medium size business with hundreds of users. It is very hard to out grow the features available, and the software continues to evolve.
My system is a 2.3GHz Dual Core AMD processor with 6GB ram and 16o GB hard drive with 2x 1GB Nics, the cost of hardware $200.00 dollars, and provides the same security and speed as an Enterprise systems costing thousands of dollars. I know that this costs more than the little home router you can pickup on Amazon for $65.00, but the protection you get is a thousand times better.
So be smart about your security, protect your internet connected devices with the best that you can get and help keep these cyber criminals at bay.
Here is a list of some UTM solution for Home Users
3.Endian Community Edition
Here a a few Internet Suite.
1. Kaspersky Internet Security
3. Trend Micro