Negear provides basic IM and P2P app controls and these have been augmented with five extra services for blocking the iTunes Store, Rhapsody, QuickTime Player, RealPlayer and Winamp. You also get options for blocking other services including GoToMyPC remote control sessions.
The appliance supports a wide range of authentication methods and you can force users to login to the appliance before being allowed Internet access. A global web access policy is enforced, but this can be customised using exception rules assigned to selected domains on the appliance. Rules allow you to either block or allow specific web categories, applications or file extensions for a domain.
The monitoring section's Dashboard includes counters for all the new services as well as Flash-based real time threat and network traffic graphs.
The monitoring section's Dashboard includes counters for all the new services as well as Flash-based real time threat and network traffic graphs. These include counters showing the top detected threats for all security modules and you can generate HTML reports from the web interface and email them out.
The ProSecure UTM9S is excellent value thanks to its useful range of security features which performed well. The UTM9S is available with a one-year subscription for a very reasonable 307 ex VAT with a full three year subscription only pushing this up to 517 ex VAT.
Verdict
The ProSecure UTM9S is a good choice for small businesses that want a low-cost UTM appliance that doesn’t skimp on features. You will need a ReadyNAS appliance for the new logging and quarantining features, but the extra expansion modules make it very versatile and our lab tests show that its anti-spam performance is good.
Chassis: Desktop Memory: 512MB RAM Flash storage: 2GB Network: 6 x Gigabit Ethernet (4 x LAN, 2 x WAN) Expansion slots: two Anti-virus: Sophos Anti-spam: Mailshell URL filtering: Commtouch Management: Web browser Options: Wireless-N module, £33; VDSL/ADLS2+ module; £61 (all ex VAT)
