Content Security in the Cloud Era: Are UTMs Up to the Challenge?

The growth of cloud computing and the explosion of mobile devices are forcing dramatic changes in the way that networks are designed, conceived, and secured. Content security in particular faces novel challenges, as mobility and Web 2.0 applications make web traffic volumes highly unpredictable, with massive spikes and troughs from one moment to the next. Traditional approaches to Unified Threat Management have typically attempted to meet this challenge by overprovisioning compute resources for content filtering, resulting in higher costs and lost efficiency, while still introducing unacceptably high latency and eroding network performance. Emerging solutions take a different approach, by transferring content-filtering tasks to cloudhosted services where massive resources can be dynamically re-provisioned as needed to handle any volume of web traffic without bogging down the network. In the cloud era – with cloud-based applications and resources thoroughly embedded in how organizations do business – this cloud-based approach to content filtering also brings other benefits for network users and administrators. Download this whitepaper to find out more.