Firewall Recommendation Time

neil_g · 30 Jan 2015 at 11:34

another vote for the sophos UTM.

VPN (end user and site to site hardware appliance), web filtering, firewall, wireless management (with sophos APs), email filtering, end point protection. etc (licence depending)

we only use ours for web filtering, firewall, wireless and VPN (both end user and site to site) and dont have any major complaints.

N00bie · 30 Jan 2015 at 11:34

I am the WatchGuard Product Manager, their pretty good bits of kit. Nikumba Private message me if you want, I can send you over some information if you want some?

Spooter · 30 Jan 2015 at 14:24

Check Point in my opinion.... If you have the budget.

Caged · 30 Jan 2015 at 19:38

Yamahahahahaha said:
In my experience the QA for their firmware updates is ****. We had a ton of tickets from mid-may last year when Sonicwall decided to move Youtube's security priority up from Low to Medium for no apparent reason. There are problems with the DPI engine and the HA aspects of the firewalls. I don't even mention them when it comes to choosing firewalls, they don't excel at anything. 'Average at best' isn't much of a reason to buy one. Their support is extremely variable. Sometimes excellent, sometimes totally worthless. Not much in between.

The Sophos appliances are pretty popular at the moment and not too expensive up-front. Their subscription costs are not small though.

I guess it's a good job we can each share product experiences then, because my experience is vastly different to yours. They'd never be my first choice for anything but I wouldn't be clamouring to rip one out either unless I had budget to burn. They offer a broad feature set and yes, they aren't excellent at anything, but they serve their market well enough and they are dirt cheap.

If you want to talk about wastes of money then look at the Meraki security appliances.

Xez · 31 Jan 2015 at 23:11

Spooter said:
Check Point in my opinion.... If you have the budget.

I haven't had the chance to even take a look at Check Point. I know that one of our clients has these but the third party engineer that supports them doesn't seem to know much about networking or security in general! I know some people do Cisco CCNA and CCNP then do some Check Point before moving to CCIE.