The science of appliance

By Dave Mitchell
Ambrose McNevin

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With SMEs facing ever more internet security threats, we decided to investigate security appliances.

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With hackers increasingly attacking vulnerable SMEs rather than high-profile corporations, tight security has never been as critical for small businesses. Many firms have realised they can no longer afford to deal with threats on a reactive basis, and have woken up to the fact that security is a business compliance need.

As a result, there’s a burgeoning demand for security appliances – hardware-based devices that have one or more security functions in a single unit. The problem facing IT managers is that there’s a vast range of similar products to choose from, with products starting at a few hundred pounds right through to tens of thousands, and extra expense being no guarantee of extra protection. And to make matters worse, there are vendors that claim security appliances are a complete waste of money and that software solutions are the way forward.
So how do you decide which is best suited to your business? There’s no simple answer, but the choice essentially boils down to three major factors: price, function and ongoing cost.

At one end of the appliance market, there are single-function boxes. You can buy a box offering email spam filtering, anti-virus protection, web-content filtering or intrusion detection for a few hundred pounds and place it on your network. The benefits will include easy installation, relatively simple management and, most likely, automatic signature updates. A single function appliance will probably be cheap, effective, easy to install and maintain a network perimeter barrier. They’re ideal if you have a specific problem (company inboxes overflowing with spam, for example) that needs addressing quickly.

But a single-function box can also pose problems: it might be slow or need regular reconfiguration. It might have a small hard drive, slow bus or limited ports. It may not have wireless or SSL VPN functionality. It could also be the first of many such devices you have to buy, and that will lead to management problems and escalating costs.

Consequently, the single-function boxes are facing stiff competition
from the more versatile unified threat management (UTM) appliances, which handle multiple security tasks from the same piece of kit. These UTM boxes will still come in a variety of guises. Some will be single function products that have had added functionality bolted on, others will be routers with security functions added in, while the most sophisticated models will be designed from the ground up to incorporate several functions. All will work at different throughput speeds, to different numbers of users and networks, across different network protocols.

Choosing the right appliance
There's no magic formula for deciding what type of security appliance will best serve your business needs, but the table on the following pages will help you decide which type of boxes to consider.

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