The first articles of my renewed freelance career are up at InfoWorld. In fairness, the bulk of the work for these was done while I was on staff, but it’s nice to see them published, especially since my friend and collaborator Brian Chee spent such an incredible amount of time working on the testing procedures and programming. We’re proud of the results, and look forward to continuing the testing regimen with new products in the near future.

The project was a review of universal threat managers (UTMs) appropriate for branch-office deployment. UTMs are like firewalls on steroids, responding to and protecting against a much wider variety of threats than can be handled by the classic firewall.

The review is in multiple parts. First we introduce the cast of UTMs, then describe the testing regimen we developed for UTMs. Next, we move on to a look at the test equipment from Ixia and Mu Dynamics that we used to run the tests. Finally we come to the UTMs themselves, with separate write-ups on the products from Astaro, SonicWall, WatchGuard, and ZyXel. Who won? Well, you’ll just have to go read the review to find out, now. Enjoy!

Categories: Enterprise, Hardware, Publications, Security
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