Netgear Unveils Gateway Security Appliance for SMBs

Networking company Netgear on Monday introduced a new member to its ProSecure Unified Threat Management (UTM) family of gateway appliances for small- and mid-sized businesses. The company says the UTM150 will serve 150 users and help secure business networks against a wide array of threats without the complexity and cost of enterprise products. Existing models in the ProSecure family are the UTM5, UTM10, UTM25 and UTM50; the newly unveiled UTM150 is the most powerful UTM currently available from the company.

 

As highlighted by Netgear on its product website and in the press release copy I received, the ProSecure UTM offers Web and email protection with no "per-user" licensing criteria. So why the talk about the 150 users supported by the UTM150? According to Netgear, the numeric tag was ultimately meant as an indication for administrators to better determine the right product fit for the networks under their charge.

 

I do not have any experience with Netgear's line of security products, though a quick glance at the company's UTM comparison chart found here gave me additional insight into the protection that the ProSecure can provide to SMBs. Beyond typical security capabilities such as VPN for secure remote connectivity and NAT for Internet sharing, the ProSecure is also capable of advanced functionalities such as Web, email and instant messaging (IM) filtering. In addition, the appliance will also recognize popular peer-to-peer protocols, and comes with gigabit WAN and LAN ports.

 

Higher-end models starting from the UTM25 have dual-WAN fail-over and intelligent load balancing, while support for Active Directory, LDAP and Radius for user authentication (for VPN) makes for an appliance that integrates easily into an existing network. In addition, the ability to perform classic routing and the availability of DMZ interfaces across the product family mean that it is well-positioned to replace existing firewalls and routers. While the touted 130Mbps anti-virus throughput the UTM150 can achieve may not be the fastest I've seen, it is nevertheless an impressive number that should be adequate for most mid-sized businesses.

 

Additional details are shed on the UTM150 in a report by Kevin Casey over at InformationWeek:

It [UTM150] runs a full version of Sophos antivirus, which includes roughly 1.2 million threat signatures. Netgear partners with Commtouch for anti-spam technology and Mailshell for Web analysis and filtering.

Finally, Netgear says that the UTM appliance is easy to configure despite its enterprise-like capability. According to its press release, IT professionals can deploy the UTM150 in place of an existing firewall or router in "less than 30 minutes."

 

The Netgear ProSecure UTM150 is priced at $1,799 in the United States and is available worldwide. The price includes a one-year subscription service for Web and email protection, 24/7 technical support and a lifetime warranty.

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