Business Security Information

I was planning on writing about endpoint security near the end of last month, but with the holidays and numerous other business and personal activities occurring at the end of the year I had to take a little sabbatical from writing posts for our website.  It is good to be back into the swing of things again, and I hope everyone has a great and successful year with their business.  As always I will be here to help you with any security issues that you may have for your business so feel free to leave comments or contact me using my contact form on my About page.

This past month I have been working with a business regarding some physical security improvements, and one of those items was a security or intrusion alarm system.  It got me thinking about businesses that I deal with who usually ask me about why a certain element of security they have implemented, such as security systems, is not working.  Most of the time when I look at their particular situation, one or more elements of the security system does not fit their needs.  Usually this is not discovered until the system has been installed and paid for, leaving the business with a system that does not fulfill their needs and sometimes results in the system not being used after a period of time.  This results in wasted time and money for the business owner as well as poor or nonexistent security.

Let me begin by saying that I am not a big proponent of using security cameras to secure a business.  I have dealt with a number of businesses that install security cameras without looking at their overall security needs.  Businesses that have installed security cameras often think they have adequate security but find out they don’t when a theft occurs.  Even though they have a nice recording (if the camera image quality is good) of the theft or other security incident occurring, the cameras did not stop or prevent the event from happening.  Security cameras can be used as a part of security to protect a business but should not be the first, and definitely not the only, element of security they use to protect their business.

As I have discussed in a previous article on UTM devices, the need for such devices came about because securing a network became more complicated.  This resulted in  the number of security devices needed to protect the network also increasing.  Instead of just a firewall, now intrusion detection, anti-virus protection, content filtering, and a variety of other resources were needed to adequately protect the network.  Along with the different devices came different interfaces to manage the technology which was difficult for small business to manage without having a number of staff knowledgeable in the different types of technology.  Since most small businesses cannot afford to hire additional staff, the UTM devices allowed less staff to manage and maintain them.

First we can not talk about something if we do not know what it is so let’s define this term of “Unified Threat Management”.  Unified Threat Management (UTM) basically is a firewall that has a variety of features and capabilities beyond just a firewall.  It is a device that can include such features as intrusion detection, intrusion prevention, anti-virus, spam filtering, content filtering, instant messaging security and other similar types of features.  Please note that this is not a complete list of features because these devices are continually changing, and different features are offered by different vendors.