What is Cyberoam and how can it help my business?

Cyberoam Technologies is a Sophos company that provides network security appliances in more than 125 countries. It offers a number of solutions to secure enterprises from cyberthreats. With its advanced features, Cyberoam helps businesses safeguard their essential information like credit card numbers, customer personal information, and many more crucial data and assets from unregistered access, malware, and hacking attempts. It offers a wide range of virtual and physical network solutions to the organization with its Next Generation Firewall and Unified Threat Management, which include all the features for protection from anti-virus, malware, spam, web filtering, and more.

Earlier, companies and individuals were addicted to using anti-virus software to protect their crucial data, but now more advanced technologies have evolved that provide hard security for businesses information. And in the current scenario, unified threat management firewalls and next-generation firewalls are quite popular. Now, let us learn more about both.

Unified Threat management Firewall

UTM is a hardware- or software-based network security tool that secures your data from unwanted external threats. It gives you complete security protection in various ways. Mostly, UTM is installed on an individual device, which can easily detect external threats.

UTM works in two ways: flow-based inspection and proxy-based inspection. Flow-based inspection gathers the data across UTM devices and checks whether there is some problem in the data flow or some error that is external. On the other hand, proxy-based is alike, but the main difference is that it occurs as a proxy, which helps in maintaining security.

Features of UTM:

· Antivirus

The UTM firewall has advanced features like viruses, trojans, spyware, and adware that protect your devices from unknown threats that are likely to happen. All the incoming traffic is verified, and if there was any suspicious activity, it would block it from introducing attacks.

· Intrusion Prevention System

It has the capability to detect threats quickly by inspecting all the incoming and outgoing traffic. The main feature of IPS is that it detects real-time traffic and then uses various measures to prevent harmful traffic.

· Antimalware

Antimalware technology helps businesses a lot in protecting their devices and data from suspicious software. It will either detect the software or use a specific type of analysis that will easily detect the malware. You can also make use of sandboxing, which will assist you in detecting potential malware that can harm your system.

· Web Filtering

UTM firewalls can easily filter the URLs to determine whether they are safe or not. Various websites are whitelisted and blacklisted; those websites that are whitelisted are allowed to be accessed, and on the other hand, those websites that are blacklisted are refused to access. Thus, UTM helps in gaining excess website control and security against mischievous URLs.

Next Generation Firewall

Next-generation firewalls are known as the third generation of Cyberoam firewalls. It includes more additional features than a traditional firewall has. One of the most important features it includes is a deep packet inspection firewall. Though UTM is also powerful, it has a lot of weaknesses, like the fact that it does not provide the latest updates, has area restrictions, has performance limits, etc. The entire workings of NGFW are based on deep packet filtering, which detects the contents of packet-based applications. These are more advanced as they are made up of seven layers of the OSI model. They are generally capable of identifying and blocking threats as soon as possible.

Features of NGFW:

· Deep Packet inspection

DPI is also known as packet sniffing. It will detect all the content in the data packets. After detecting it, it will either block or reroute the data packets with suspicious codes.

· Threat Intelligence

NGFW is inbuilt with the Threat Intelligence feature, which keeps the system updated with advanced threats that might happen and prevents the following measures from happening: It is the data that is installed from cloud services, which includes the IP addresses of spammers, new kinds of viruses, and many more errors that are suspicious. Threat intelligence meets cyberthreats at every end.

· Identity Awareness

There are chances that anyone can misuse your identity, so to avoid this issue, NGFW offers identity-based policies to provide access to a particular user. It can easily recognize the access behind an IP and grant access according to the level of access.

· IPS

It monitors the suspicious activity, and if it finds any, it takes preventive action, like blocking or reporting it.

These all-enhanced features of NGFW make it more advanced to defend against cyberthreats. Now let us move further and discuss how UTM and NGFW can help businesses.

Role of UTM and NGFW in businesses:

The role of firewalls has always been to protect the information of businesses from an unknown threat, as has the role of UTM and NGFW, which can prevent harm by detecting all malicious activities. Both of them are advanced and quite powerful, which helps a lot for enterprises to maintain credibility and reliability among their employees and customers.

Businesses whose top concern is security often choose an advanced firewall like UTM or NGFW from a Cyberoam partner. Some new start-ups might wonder which firewall they must choose to secure their business. Well! Both are quite helpful to businesses, but before choosing, you might check the features and how beneficial they will be for your company. So, let us discuss the pros and cons of UTM and NGFW.

Pros of using UTM firewall:

· Low maintenance cost

The UTM firewall can be installed on a single device. Earlier, companies needed to install it on various devices, which resulted in a lot of expenditure. Thus, there are a lot of maintenance costs, but UTM saves all the unnecessary costs.

· Integrated management

To fulfil your security needs, you did not need multiple devices, and therefore IT administrators can control many threats from a single interface.

· Simplified operations

If you are a new startup and you do not have technical expertise, you do not need to think about it because the UTM firewall has the capability to tie together with other network security features in a simple manner. Therefore, it is beneficial to all the companies.

Cons of UTM firewall:

· Depends on a single vendor

Some companies rely on a single vendor only, which is not at all beneficial, as the best method is to use security tools from various vendors, as if one fails to detect the incoming threat, the other can verify it, which will ensure more security.

· Performance error

Performance errors are likely to occur as when UTM handles a large number of clients, it reduces the performance of the network.

· Single Point of failure

Though there is an advantage to using a single device for UTM, it also has a disadvantage because it may result in failure, as anyone who tries to break down your network may target UTM.

Pros of NGFW:

· More visibility

NGFW includes incredible features like application control and deep packet inspection that help organizations differentiate between safe and unsafe applications.

· Upgraded Technology

With the continuous emergence of threats, updated technology is a must. NGFW includes threat intelligence, which identifies suspicious information easily and quickly. thus, making sure to keep every system safe from unknown threats.

· Multiple security features

NGFW contains multiple security features that help businesses easily manage and control all applications. Perhaps simplifying the security network.

Cons of NGFW:

· Too costly for small business

Though NGFW helps reduce costs in the future and is mostly used by large companies, small business owners may find it costly to implement. Luckily, if you operate a business in India, you can benefit from an organization like Wroffy, which offers NGFW at a reasonable price.

· Complex in managing

If you were addicted to the use of traditional firewalls, you may find NGFW difficult and complex to manage.

Last thoughts:

These are all the pros and cons of UTM and NGFW. Selecting and implementing any one of them depends on your business factors. For example, if you want to implement a low-cost firewall, you can choose a UTM firewall. But if you want powerful or strong security, you can choose NGFW. After all, choosing any will enhance the security of your business.