UTMs, which are typically purchased as cloud services or network appliances, provide firewall, intrusion detection, antimalware, spam and content filtering and VPN capabilities in one integrated package that can be installed and updated easily. UTMs for enterprise customers may also include more advanced features such as identity-based access control, load balancing, quality of service (QoS), intrusion prevention, SSL and SSH inspection and application awareness.
The principal advantage of a UTM product is its ability to reduce complexity. The principal disadvantage is that a UTM appliance can become a single point of failure (SPOF).
UTM appliances are sometimes referred to as next-generation firewalls.