Unified threat management (UTM) is a comprehensive solution that has recently emerged in the network security industry. UTM is the evolution of the traditional firewall into an all-inclusive security product able to perform multiple security functions within one single appliance: network firewalling, network intrusion prevention and gateway antivirus (AV), gateway anti-spam, VPN, content filtering, load balancing, data leak prevention and on-appliance reporting
The advantages of unified security lie in the fact that rather than administering multiple systems that individually handle antivirus, content filtering, intrusion prevention and spam filtering functions, organisations now have the flexibility to deploy a single UTM appliance that takes over all their functionality into a single rack mountable network appliance.