To improve a company's security posture with minimal infrastructure, which solution should be implemented?

Deploying a unified threat management (UTM) appliance is considered an effective solution for improving a company's security posture with minimal infrastructure. A UTM appliance consolidates multiple security features such as firewall capabilities, intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS), antivirus, anti-spam filtering, and more into a single device. This consolidation simplifies the management of security measures and reduces the need for additional, separate devices for each specific security function.

Organizations benefit from the single-point deployment of a UTM as it streamlines configuration, updates, and monitoring, making it a cost-effective and resource-efficient solution. By using a UTM, a company can enhance its defense against a broad range of threats while minimizing the complexity and overhead that comes with managing multiple standalone security solutions.

In contrast, an anti-spam gateway primarily addresses email security but does not provide the comprehensive protection that a UTM offers. A proxy server can improve privacy and security but focuses mainly on web traffic filtering and may require additional tools for a complete security posture. A web application firewall (WAF) is highly specialized for protecting web applications but does not encompass the same breadth of protection as a UTM, thus may require additional infrastructure to address other security needs.