# Configuring NTP for the SMC Appliance and Security Engine

You can use external NTP servers to provide time synchronization for the SMC Appliance and Security Engines.

By default, the SMC Appliance uses the public Forcepoint NTP servers. The Management Server and default Log Server synchronize with the SMC Appliance time.

By default, Security Engines get time setting commands from the Management Server. If an Security Engine is configured to use NTP and it can successfully get the time from an external NTP server, the Security Engine ignores time setting commands from the Management Server.

You must have an SMC Appliance to configure NTP for SMC servers in the SMC Client.

Note: You cannot configure NTP in the SMC Client for SMC installations on third-party hardware or virtualization platforms. On third-party hardware or virtualization platforms, the SMC gets the time from the operating system. When you use third-party hardware or virtualization platforms, you must configure NTP at the operating system level on the third-party hardware or virtualization platform. For more information, see Knowledge Base article 9680.