You monitor Internet connections that are going through the firewall and you can see what’s happening as it happens, and set policies based on what you observe. Sophos UTM provides excellent visibility into the applications that are being used on your network and allows you to control access to them. One of the things that people really like about TMG is its application layer filtering, which allows you to control specific applications. Like TMG, the Sophos NGFW includes the capability to do deep packet inspection to examine the content of the data packets to detect viruses, indicators of an attack or other traffic that’s not compliant with your policies. That is generally taken to mean a firewall that goes beyond traditional blocking of specific ports, and like most modern firewalls, Sophos adds many additional features never dreamed of in the old simple stateless firewall days. Sophos bills the firewall component of UTM as a “next generation firewall” (NGFW). dynamic packet filtering), so that the firewall tracks the state of each connection and stores the information in state tables, and identifies and blocks packets that do not match active connections. One of the criteria is the inclusion of standard stateful firewall functionality (a.k.a. We’re naturally going to look hard at firewall functionality when considering any replacement. Many members of consider TMG to be one of the best and easiest to use network firewalls available and that’s why there were so many moans and groans when Microsoft announced that it was being discontinued. Threat management encompasses more than just firewall functionality, but the firewall is a vital component of any solution that aspires to take the place of TMG. Then in subsequent installments, we’ll delve more deeply into additional features. In the first of this series of articles, we’ll discuss some of the benefits of using Sophos UTM as a replacement for TMG and take a look at UTM’s firewall and NAT features and functionalities as well as its Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) feature. Sophos UTM can, of course, be integrated with Active Directory for authentication, or it can use other LDAP, RADIUS, TACACS+ and Novell eDirectory authentication servers. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant now classifies Sophos as Leaders Quadrant members in the unified threat management sector. Their UTM solution is based on Astaro technology, which they acquired around four years ago. Sophos has been in the security business for a long time and you might be familiar with their antivirus software. You can also set up cluster nodes to distribute traffic for redundancy and load balancing, or use the high availability failover feature to create a “hot standby” system that will take over if the primary system fails. So you have plenty of options regardless of the design model you prefer. You can also deploy it in Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud. The best part is that you don’t have to buy a new appliance you can run UTM on the server on which you run TMG, or in a virtual machine running on Hyper-V or VMware. In fact, Sophos is heavily marketing this product as the idea TMG replacement UTM based appliances are being sold based on that promise. One replacement candidate that I kept hearing great things about, from others who either were still in the testing stage or who had gone ahead and made a replacement decision, was Sophos Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution. You can find the first article in that series here. A while back, I wrote a five-part series about some of the factors you should consider when you start evaluating possible replacement solutions. Since Microsoft announced its plans to stop development and eventually stop support for many of its Forefront products, including our beloved Threat Management Gateway, many of us have started thinking ahead to the day when we’ll have to implement a replacement. We all know that our love affair with TMG will one day come to an end. If you would like to be notified of when Deb Shinder releases the next part in this article series please sign up to our Real Time Article newsletter.
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