A fundamental truth for organizations worldwide: protecting mission-critical applications, sensitive electronic data, and underlying computing infrastructure is a challenging and never-ending task. A wide array of ongoing trends ensures that IT and security personnel will always have their hands full. Most significantly, a shift in hacker motivation has led to the development of increasingly elusive threats that are emerging and spreading at an alarming rate. Other factors include a steady flow of new vulnerabilities that need to be addressed and growing levels of user mobility and inter-connectivity among organizations - trends that introduce more ""points of entry"" and emphasize the need to deploy countermeasures not just at obvious Internet boundaries but throughout the internal computing environment and on individual endpoints as well. This paper covers and includes:

• The Threat Management Challenge
• The Holistic Perspective
• The Solution: Universal Threat Management
• Unified Threat Management: A Sensible Starting Point
• Dedicated Threat Management: The Key to Complete Physical Coverage
• Unified Administration: The Secret Ingredient