Demystifying UTM and NGF

You may be here to understand the difference between Unified Threat Management (UTM) and Next-Generation Firewalls (NGF).

Here’s the punch line: there really isn’t a difference. UTM and NGF are two marketing terms that have been developed to put a label on the advance of products designed to provide various protective capabilities. The two terms do represent a somewhat different point of view; let me explain.

UTM is the representation of products that began to combine previously-separate capabilities like anti-virus, anti-spam, web filtering, and so on. This was an answer to the fragmentation of different discrete products, each with its own small task.

NGF is the representation of firewall manufacturers who began to realize that they needed to incorporate many other types of threat-prevention capabilities into their firewalls, such as (you guessed it), anti-virus, anti-spam, web filtering, and so on.

UTM and NGF were different a few years ago, but as product makers from both ends filled in functionality, they met in a common middle where there’s no longer any practical difference.

• sidebar from an upcoming book. Copyright (C) 2012 someone.