Opinion: Once were hackers

At the time, the conventional wisdom was that this was not much use compared to a ‘real’ firewall, which you had to build and configure yourself from various bits of hardware and software and then fine-tune it against the evil hackers.

Most of the experts at this black art were former hackers themselves. But Watchguard persisted and the company is still marketing their one-box security solutions, but these days they are not alone.

With a deft name change to ‘unified threat management’, which sounds so much more professional than ‘network appliance’, heavy hitters such as Fortinet, to name just one member of the UTM army, have joined pioneers like Watchguard.

After all, ‘network appliance’ did sound like some kind of Ethernet enabled fridge or dishwasher. Now the reason to name Fortinet is that they have just teamed up with Dimension Data, who are pretty much the accepted experts in enterprise integration. And that means UTM just got a whole lot of street cred.

Whether you’re a reseller of Watchguard, Fortinet or one of the many other security-in-a-box brands, your sales pitch just got a whole lot easier.

If the big end of town thinks it’s cool to use a box rather than a custom-built white-box running something from the penguin pen, then it must be cool for you to sell one of these appliances to your customers.

Tell ‘em DiData said it’s cool. And the good news is that you can remotely manage these UTM boxes, which means you can also remotely charge for your services.
Gotta be happy about that.