Sophos is going to market with a new central management tool designed to help solution providers manage unified threat management (UTM) devices across their full customer base, regardless of location.

The Sophos UTM Manager is available immediately as a free software download supporting UTM management from a single pane of glass.

"You simply log into the system to see a complete dashboard of all your connected installations," said senior product manager Angelo Comazzetto.

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Over the years, unified threat management has emerged as a popular strategy to support a wide range of security technologies such as antivirus and firewalls. The simplified management is viewed by Sophos as an effective means of helping channel partners to better serve their customers while at the same time maintaining cost control.

"You get single sign-on for all the devices. And then they see each device, with a world map to show their locations," Comazzetto said. "A lot of this is about monitoring the equipment, being able to see when the licenses expire, and to do basic management functions. You can also push out Web configuration, firewall configuration, management policies, and push all of that out to 100 devices in five seconds. You can also create VPN tunnels and manage our new endpoint antivirus and device control policies, all from within the UTM manager."

The system, which has already been released, can also give specific customers details on their infrastructure without enabling them to see infrastructure belonging to other clients. According to Comazzetto, the channel partner merely needs to set up a separate group in order to accommodate such client requests.

Comazzetto said that free access to the UTM Manager demonstrates the value Sophos places on the channel in serving their combined customers. "My philosophy is that if people want to invest in our products, it seems kind of cheap to then say that if you want to effectively manage all the stuff, you need to give us more money," he said. "So we give it to them for free, rather than turn them upside down and try to shake more money out of them."

PUBLISHED OCT. 31, 2012