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Several years ago, Marcus Ranum, security industry luminary and inventor of the proxy firewall, began talking about the emergence of a "god box"?/font>a single appliance capable of handling all aspects of network security. "There's really very little benefit to having these things separate," says Ranum, who sees the various security technologies as a side effect of the fact that different companies had different objectives at a certain time for what they were going to build. The growing trend of security vendors continuing to acquire each other and integrate separate technologies into a single box has proved Ranum's prediction true. Three years ago, Gartner Vice President and Research Fellow John Pescatore also predicted the emergence of a basic network security appliance as he witnessed security vendors combining and collapsing into a single market. Known today as ISGs (integrated security gateways), next-generation firewalls, and UTM (unified threat management) systems, these products are less expensive than purchasing individual components and easier to administer. In its 2007 Security Trends report, enterprise IT researcher the Burton Group cites vendors are increasingly turning to building converged perimeter devices. Organizations can no longer afford to maintain a security infrastructure composed of multiple, independent, and disparate point solutions. Additionally, the evolving threatscape of blended attacks calls for security products to be able to operate in unison to effectively detect and mitigate new attack vectors. But Ranum warns that vendors need to be cognizant as to the quality of the products and services being bundled together. "When vendors have a bad acquisition strategy, they end up with some products that are good and some that are mediocre," he says. "Vendors build a portfolio of products?/font>some of them are first-rate, second-rate, third-rate, and off the charts in terms of stuff that is really bad. Unfortunately, that's where we're heading toward with some of these things." Symantec's multifunction security appliance line has already become a casualty. Unable to capture the enterprise market with its SGS (Symantec Gateway Security), SNS (Symantec Network Security) 7100, and SGS Advanced Manager 3.0 appliances, last year it laid off the staff of its security appliance division. For existing customers, Symantec said it was reducing its investment in its appliances and vowed to continue development of the underlying technologies and support the discontinued product and will focus on the security services market instead. The successful multifunction security appliance vendors are typically ones that have started with core perimeter security services such as firewall, IDS/IPS, and VPN. As a builder of firewall and IDS software, Ranum says, "If you look at what a router, firewall, and IDS do, they are looking at traffic on the wire and putting it back out. There's not much additional code needed once you have your packet inspection layer code written, and from there it's not hard to add components. As soon as you add Layer 7 processing, it's not a big jump to build in Web load balancing, too. While you're doing that, you might as well make it a Web firewall and monitor port 25 to look for spam, spyware, and phishing scams." Another option many vendors turn to for providing multiple functionalities is by licensing existing solution providers' technologies.

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