In today’s modern, distributed computing network, where companies and organisations need to secure IT not just for the head office, but for remote locations as well, the ability to control security for multiple sites from one single location is becoming increasingly important. With some security systems, the tasks of configuration, updating, rebooting, etc. for remote sites might all have to be done separately and repeated for each location. Administrators could be faced with managing remote security appliances individually, possibly having to send someone out to a remote site to carry out certain tasks, such as configuration or establishing VPN tunnels. This can be difficult, time consuming, costly and complex and, in some cases, it is practically or financially impossible.

It can be further complicated if there are multiple appliances, delivering multiple levels of security, such as firewall, VPN, spam blocking, gateway anti-virus, web content management and intrusion detection/prevention.

However vendors, such as WatchGuard Technologies, have now responded to the need for strong centralised control with their range of Firebox UTM (unified threat management) security appliances, which make controlling security for multiple sites quick, easy and cost-effective.