As I see it, anyone that implements e-mail anti-virus is expecting latency for that traffic. That’s true if you configure it in your UTM as it is for an standalone AV appliance. In both cases e-mail traffic is going to be inspected for AV so… wait for it.

For traffic different than email you don’t expect any additional latency, since you’re not enforcing AV inspection on it. Not all UTM’s configurations are based on the “all or nothing” concept. Actually, I’ve seen many UTM products with much more granularity than pure Firewall, IPS, AV, etc.

please send me an email directly and we can communicate better that way. In short, any survey is a blunt instrument and we don’t ponly rely on it to make an assessment of the market.

We are looking at both on-server and appliance-based WAFs. If a question doesn’t apply just comment “N/A” or add a comment. I think I have a good grasp already on the products so I won’t look twice if I see “N/A” for questiosn from either appliance (“do you run on apache?”) or on-server (“how many physical interface and of what type”) vendors.

Are UTMs sweeping the enterprise? No. Are some enterprises using them? Absolutely. Some of your points are clearly out of touch. In this economy I am seeing a collapsing of hierarchies and divisions in IT and security teams- and as fewer people perform more, and more disparate tasks, the “unified” aspect of UTMs is a significant asset.

Further, your point about “best of breed” is off the mark on two critical points: First, many UTMs do provide “best of breed” quality features. Second, many “best of breed” solutions are not deployed and maintained in optimal configurations, often due to tedious or convoluted configuration and management routines. The significant growth of the field of “firewall management” solutions clearly shows the failures of “industry leaders” to provide manageable solutions.

Finally, I have to ask if Gartner’s results have not become somewhat self-selecting. Conservative companies turning to a conservative analyst firm, which then focuses said conservative clients…doesn’t seem like a recipe for either innovation, or spotting it.

(Yes, I work for a UTM vendor. No, I do not speak for them).

I ask only because it’s relevant to your post and since we were invited to partake in the Quadrant this time the ‘grading process’ seems off. What about SaaS WAF’s and software-based WAFs that live with the webapps themselves and are not hardware? I have a sneaking suspicion that our SaaS WAF is what got us invited to the party, however, the the framework for the Quadrant doesn’t leave room for such solutions. Have I misinterpreted?

There also seems to be a lack of webappsec related questions to the Quadrant. What about high-level proactive security features such as secure session management, URL encryption and a web authentication framework?

Would like to hear your thoughts! Here’s our view on the SaaS side:
http://www.artofdefence.com/dokumente/Cloud_AppSec_Whitepaper.pdf