KerioControl Reviews

The solution is used for site-to-site VPN connections and it is valued for its cost efficiency and easy connectivity. It is especially beneficial for multi-site VPNs and is used in about fifteen different components.

KerioControl has provided a financial benefit as it allows purchasing one license that includes all necessary features, including VPN, without extra charges.

We use the tool for VPN and security. 

The tool shows what has been blocked externally. It's very good because once installed and correctly set up, it allows you to work from home as if you are in the office, without any errors or issues. It's very simple to use, click to connect or disconnect.

The solution pushes out updates every five to ten minutes to the cloud. 

The filtering rules are valuable. The product is easy to use.

There is no protocol for VPN in Android. It would be good if the product added a protocol for VPN. The upgrades make the network slower.

I use KerioControl for some networks with a medium range of users. The product is not a good solution for enterprise networks, but it is good for small and medium networks.

Compared to other solutions, accounting and live monitoring of firewall status are very good features in KerioControl.

The solution is user-friendly, has a very easy menu, and is a complete firewall for small or mid-range networks.

We have 100 internet bandwidths, and we want to use these bandwidths, and our Carrier supports 900 bandwidth. However, in the future, we will have problems as we will require a larger bandwidth capacity of a firewall to handle the internet connection. We have 2000 devices in our network that use the internet. We handle users in and outside our network and see the logs of clients, internet connections, HTPs connections and VPN connections. Hence the solution can be improved to create the capability for larger bandwidths that support our business needs. Additionally, logging and reporting could be improved.

We use it ourselves and deploy it to our customers, which are small and medium-sized businesses. Our use cases are for both ourselves and our clients, mainly as a frontline protection for their internal networks to filter viruses and threats as well as for web filtering to ensure employees and guest networks don't access material that wouldn't be appropriate to be viewed. It's also used for remote access VPNs so remote users can access internal servers and resources, as well as site-to-site VPNs for multi-site offices to access resources located either at the main HQ headquarters or at an alternate site.

It does antivirus, malware, and ransomware. We feel the coverage is complete across the entire spectrum of malware, viruses, and most ransomware. It also covers some types of adware, which is an unwanted program that's not necessarily bad, but there's no reason to have it.

We have a lot of other companies that were multi-site companies which had servers at different sites not talking to each other. They had remote workers or maybe they were using open RDP as their access to their internal network. These customers were getting ransomware infections and constantly just getting frustrated not being able to share resources between sites and this gives them the capability. I have a lot of customers, especially in the non-profit market, where we've had a lot of success deploying the solution. 

A lot of the non-profits also have open WiFi and the filtering tools have been great for making sure that the WiFi bandwidth isn't drained by somebody sitting there and just surfing videos. We can control the open WiFi and we can control public computers to make sure that they stay just on the sites that we want them to stay on, e.g., employment sites, training, etc. So, it's been really helpful for the non-profits.

If a tech has a basic understanding of firewalls, NATing, and security, it is amazing how quick we can teach them how to use the product to its full capabilities. We can take a half day to a day and a brand new tech who's never seen the product can pretty much understand it enough to set it up, work with a customer, and make changes that a customer requests. There's nothing better than a customer calling and saying, "We need to add this site," and instead of saying, "Well, let me open a ticket and get an engineer to look at the thing," we go, "One second," and, through the MyKerio portal, find their firewall, remote into it, make the change, and say, "Okay, test it now. Works? Perfect." Hang up the phone and we are done.

With COVID-19 and everything that has happened, customers would call us up and say, "We're shutting down. Friday's our last day. Everybody is going to work from home." In 24 hours, we could have them all working remotely. The amount of time and simplicity of getting users set up with the VPN allowed us to get massive numbers of users working remotely at businesses that had never even considered remote work as a possibility. Or, maybe the owner had a little bit of remote capability, but that was it. Just through the ease of and the free VPN client it was amazing how quickly we could roll out VPN to everybody, we had whole companies remotely working overnight.

Our main customer base is superyachts, and they have the Kerio for traffic rules and bandwidth management of the various networks on board. They can optimize traffic for crew versus owners and guests, the VIPs that might be on board. They also use it for bandwidth sharing. They usually have a mixture of the VSAT satellite internet and 4G internet access. Sometimes they have WiFi, for example if they connect to a WiFi hotspot in a marina, as well as shoreline or fixed DSL. They use it to manipulate the internet traffic, so they can say the crew uses the slower VSAT and the guest gets the fast 4G or shoreline.

They also use it to see what's going on. If the boss complains that the internet's slow, they can quickly see if someone is downloading a load of updates or streaming Netflix and they can block them. They just want to have control, as the product name suggests, over the internet traffic.

In-house, we use the NG300, but because we are a partner, we use various hardware platforms. At the moment it's nearly all the NG series, the 100, 200, and 500. The most common that we use is the NG500. I'm interested in using the next-generation, which is due out in the next couple of months, but I've also used the virtual Kerio platform on a VMware hypervisor.

There's a virtual appliance, but also software installed on a Windows PC. We build our own virtual "guest" on a host, we've done a couple of those, and then attached it to a switch with VLANs, so we've covered all platforms.

We have these Kerios on anything from a 30-meter Sunseeker, with five or six crew members, four guest cabins, and a couple of master cabins, or a master and a VIP. They might have 20 guests so there would be a total of about 30 users and some 50 devices for those users. There is also all the AV equipment. And we've gone right up to a 120-meter superyacht, with 50 to 100 crew and space for about 200 guests. We've also got a couple of ski chalets, and a private island in Ibiza. A few hundred users is its top end, but as far as network-connected endpoints go, it could be in the few thousands of devices.

The way it improves the way our company functions is through the VPN, because we offer support services. Normally, we would have to rely on TeamViewer to a computer on board, or to get on the phone and tell somebody to take pictures or press buttons, where we can't see what's going on. 

In the last year or two, after setting up the VPN, any of our guys can log straight in to the system and they are effectively on board. That is a big help because our customers are all over the world. They could be in Ibiza one day, but then they're heading to the South of France and then they're going off to Greece or crossing the Atlantic. Sometimes it's difficult to send somebody out to them quickly. They might not want to pay for somebody to come out. It could be two or three days of round-trip travel for a half-hour job. The VPN makes it more efficient. We can jump in and see what's going on. We can mimic our engineer's being on board the vessel via the VPN. That's the biggest benefit. And it's instant. Someone rings me up and I've got a single VPN connection and I can get to their networks.

We use the solution mainly as a firewall. 

I am impressed with the tool's firewall filtering capacity.