Netgear ProSecure UTM10 review

The UTM10 can handle up to 10 IPsec and five SSL VPN tunnels and in both cases you get wizards to help set them up. For the latter, you use network objects to define the systems and services you want available for remote access and you can apply local, RADIUS, LDAP or AD authentication.

Mailshell claims a high anti-spam performance and to test this we set the appliance up to filter live email for over a week. We asked the appliance to tag and forward any spam and on each client we created Outlook rules to move tagged messages to separate folders. At the end of the test we calculated a 97 per cent success rate with only fifteen false positives.

Commtouch was just as impressive and for testing we blocked the games and gambling categories. We checked out a range of online bingo and poker sites and called it a day after the UTM10 blocked us from the first 50 sites visited in each category.

The scourge of social networking was handled well as with this category blocked we were kept away from the likes of Facebook and Twitter. We often find these types of sites get dropped in different categories so were pleased to see a lookup tool provided where you can enter a URL and find out what category it comes under.

We were impressed with the ProSecure UTM10 during testing as it proved to be very easy to deploy and no pushover in the performance stakes. Small business that want a simple yet well featured plug and go security appliance should definitely take a closer look.