Barracuda CloudGen Firewall Reviews

I use Barracuda to protect my network from intruders and to control application usage, as well as for bandwidth balancing and prioritizing applications. It is used for external protection and internal restrictions.

As the head of technology, I design networks and infrastructure. While designing the infrastructure, my concern is the security part, including the firewall. The solution has to be automated and I need to have proper support once I install the infrastructure. I need 24-hour support, which cannot be done on my side as my IT team is small.

The way Barracuda has helped is that, once I have configured a system, it is taken care of by the Barracuda support team. If anything goes wrong or I need any kind of support, I just call their support number and get 24/7 support. They call me back from this or that country, they take over the firewall, and they provide the solution. They are basically working as my extended support team. This is one of the advantages of Barracuda.

In addition, during the eight years I have been using Barracuda, I have had hundreds of thousands of attacks on my network and all of the attacks have been addressed by Barracuda with a proper solution for all of them. My network has never been interrupted, there has been no denial of service—nothing like that—for eight years. That's why I am loyal to Barracuda.

Overall, Barracuda has increased the speed and performance of the infrastructure by 15 percent. And it has decreased expenses in the sense that it is protecting my data. In the smallest network that we handle, the value of data per year is €20 million.

Its advanced protection against threats like malware is fantastic. As I noted, in eight years I haven't had an incident.

Barracuda provides Zero Trust access for work from home, for almost any application and from almost any device. That is important because of the Corona situation. Before Corona, we already had about 20 percent in a work-from-home situation in our network, but because of Corona, 80 percent of our work is done from home right now. That makes this feature really important. Before, it was 20 percent important, but now it is 80 percent important.

In addition, its central management, especially when it comes to distributed environments, is great. I can generate and save a setting and then apply that setting across the network with just one click.

There is room for improvement in

• performance
• the support language.

The support they're providing right now is from a different country, and in our country, there are people—network admins and IT heads—who don't speak English properly. So Barracuda needs to provide support agents who speak additional languages, such as Bangla.

Another problem with Barracuda, in my experience, is the appliance lifetime. For example, the policy for the X300 device that they sold to us was that you renew every year and, after the third year, you get a new appliance. But after the third year, they made the device obsolete. So instead of getting the next one free, they charged me for a new one. This kind of bad sales practice is not appreciated.

I have been using Barracuda for the last eight years. I started using the X300 and then the X400, and now I'm using the cloud solution as well.

On average, the firewall has ceased service or has gone down during seven days out of 365.

Deploying the solution is pretty straightforward. The problem is that the authorized distributors' deployment engineers in our country make it complex. Generally, it is self-explanatory and not very difficult. So they have to improve their local support.

One problem with Barracuda is that they don't have an auto conversion of the settings from different routers such as MikroTik or Cisco. That means you have to do every rule manually. In a small, 100-computer network, it can take six to seven hours to write all the rules manually.

The pricing is very cheap compared to Cisco ASA, which we used before, and compared to Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet. Barracuda has different solutions for different people. For my SMB-level infrastructure, Barracuda has given me a proper solution that is half of the price of Palo Alto or Fortinet.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Barracuda is that the next time I buy a product I'll make sure that the device support and the device life cycle and replacement are very clearly written on my document. In addition, I have to ensure that support is from a local team and that it will not be on a call basis to somewhere else.

The last project was a project for a government, and it was to build a secure, private distributed system in two different countries.

In the last project, we choose this brand of firewall. Normally, customers are asking us which is the better solution. Normally, since Barracuda has many different features, it is quite easy to use Barracuda instead of something else, since it offers a full set of features. It has a full-feature license. It is easy to adapt the solution to the customer's needs.

It's great to have an unlimited VPN, advanced threat protection, many other features inside the proxy server, and so on. It's far easier than building out of Barracuda fiber than, for example, Check Point, where you have to buy every single module independently from the other.

It is a product that is very feature-rich.

It's quite robust.

The initial setup is very easy.

It's great for handling complex items. If you want to flag Facebook you can. If you want to create a cluster, it's easy. There are many things you can do using this product and they make it all very simple. 

The management program is something that only certain people understand. It does its own logic sometimes. It's very hard to use it. Barracuda is complex in terms of doing simple things. It could be more user-friendly. It needs to be more logical.

The price is a bit higher than other vendors.

I've been using the solution for six to eight years It's been a while. 

It is a very stable product. I've never had a problem bad enough to reboot one firewall.

The portfolio is quite broad. We can sell this firewall to very small companies or to big ones.

The scalability is easy. If you need to switch the file, you just need to contact them, switch with the IR model, pay the difference, and then you can load the old parameter file to the new one. So it's easy.

I call support sometimes. I have to admit that customer support was better three or four years ago. Now, they switched their first level of support to India. Sometimes it's quite difficult to understand the technician. Then, if you go to the second level of support, it's far easier, since they are here in Austria. It's not a problem to talk with them. The second level of support is performed by people who are writing the software. They know the product very well.

Neutral

We've also used Check Point in the past, however, it's not a full-feature solution. 

The implementation process is a walk in the park. IT's just next, next, next and you are done. You change a couple of parameters, and then you are online. Then you just adapt the firewall to the customer's needs. The setup is very easy. It's even easier if you are using the control center, even if it's quite expensive.

The initial setup itself might take 15 minutes or so. 

It's a five out of five in terms of ease of setup. 

There is some maintenance, however, it is minimal. Maybe every four years you'll need to switch the firewall. That's it. The new firewall is sent directly to the customer site. Then we just need to download the configuration file from the old one and just turn off a switch and turn on the new one.

We do the entire implementation by ourselves. 

The cost of the solution is higher than other vendors, yet with the extra cost. 

For a low-level firewall, it's likely less than 1,00 Francs a year. They work on a yearly subscription model. 

We typically buy a full-featured package that has everything inside. 

I'd rate the pricing a three out of five in terms of affordability. 

I'm working with the most recent update. 

We are reselling Barracuda to our customers.

I'd recommend the solution to others.

I would rate it eight out of ten. 

The solution is the main firewall for a site. It protects it from any inbound threats and also controls outbound traffic. That's the main use.

They have very good security. You need special client software in order to configure the firewall. It doesn't have its own web interface, so as far as security goes, they're locked down very tightly.

The solution is stable.

It's scalable. 

They have a very complicated interface. It's very hard to learn. 

The administration interface should be more intuitive or easier to use. They should also include bundle training. That would be a benefit.

The initial setup is complex. 

We found the solution to be stable. It's more stable than Fortinet. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. 

Scaling depends on the connected circuits and their bandwidth. I don't think that we were hitting, or even close to the box's capability, the firewall itself. So far, it's been scalable. 

Everybody in the organization is using it, and we have about 150 users. It was for various different roles. Since we are a healthcare organization, we had healthcare providers, front desk registration staff, administrative staff, and various different types of people on it.

Support was not very good at all. It could use a lot of improvement. They don't really have good documentation. The interface is quite complex. The available training is not very good, and the documentation is not very good, so if you always have to speak to an engineer to solve your problem and that is not very good support.

Neutral

We previously used Fortinet.

We were having some hardware quality issues with Fortinet. They were not stable. They would freeze up quite frequently and require frequent reboots. Barracuda ended up being more stable.

The initial setup it requires a session with a Barracuda engineer that can help to translate all of the rules from the old firewall to the new firewall. They should, rather than making the interface very complex, simplify the interface, and include training so that it can have more of a do-it-yourself approach.

We were upgrading from a previous model or a previous different vendor. We were using Fortinet before, and the implementation didn't take very long. It probably took a couple of months.

Just one network administrator is needed for deployment and maintenance. 

The solution was necessary so it's not really a return on investment. It couldn't be measured since we were replacing one firewall with another firewall as it was necessary to do so. I'm not exactly sure how we would measure the return on investment in that case.

Pricing is comparable to other firewall solutions. I don't really have an opinion about the cost. Cost seems to be in line with their competitors.

We're a customer and end-user.

As far as the stability and performance go, I would rate the solution probably at an eight out of ten.

The solution is deployed on premises.

The ability to be deployed and supported remotely is valuable. They also have a feature called instant hardware replacement.

Essentially, if you subscribe to a service, they replace the whole system in about four years, including the hardware. So, you have a new and upgraded one. Since there is a technology refresh, you don't have to consider replacing it or acquiring a new one.

The price could be better. The problem is that the network security landscape is very dynamic. New threats come in daily, and new approaches must be made. However, we haven't encountered anything Barracuda CloudGen Firewall couldn't handle so far.

We have been using this solution for several years.

Based on our experience, we find it very stable. We can set it up and forget about it. However, there are a few instances where we had to add capabilities and we did not have any problems.

The solution is scalable, but if you acquire it for a specific size or capability and exceed that capability, you need to acquire a new solution. You don't have to do a forklift upgrade, and you can add the capability. Essentially, they work together to provide a higher capacity and add solutions, but it's not elegant because you have multiple hardware platforms.

 The customer service and support team is very supportive.

Positive

The setup is a bit complex. However, if you have the required skill set, it is easy. Unfortunately, in our experience, we didn't have the skill set the first time we did it, so it took us a while. The Philippine distributor was also not well-versed with the solution when we had our first implementation. Now that we developed the skillset, setting up is not that difficult.

I rate the price seven out of ten.

We do not have the experience of comparing it with another NG firewall. However, we can compare it with the traditional hardware-based firewall. I think Barracuda is more flexible because of how it is designed, with the capability to add features. So it is very flexible.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. I would recommend Barracuda CloudGen Firewall to almost everybody, and I couldn't foresee anyone to whom I wouldn't recommend unless they are very price sensitive.

Our primary use case is for our office abroad. There are 50 of us at the office each day. We also use the firewall for working from home and calling in.

What I find the most valuable about the Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is that it allows you to see what people are doing and what the highest rate or performance is among our team. Another valuable feature is the security of this solution. To further improve security, we'll buy the F280 version of this product.

I would like to see the connection improved. We now have a one gigabyte connection and the old firewall has 500 MBs. That's not enough, which is why we are also buying a new firewall for at least one gigabit, which will give us a faster line and faster internet.

In the next release, I'd like to see more security for viruses and similar things and also block DDOS.

I have been using Barracuda CloudGen Firewall for about seven years now.

I would rate the scalability of this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. We have been using Barracuda for seven years, and thus far, we've had no issues as it was working perfectly.

I would rate the scalability of this solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. We have about 80 users currently in various departments.

Our partners usually contact their technical support. The feedback we got from our partners about the technical support was that they provide insightful and helpful support.

The initial setup took one day and it was done through third-party installers.

Implementation was done through a third party.

To further improve security, we'll buy the F280 version of this product. The F280 subscription costs EUR 3,000. There are a few extra expenses like paying for updates or new firewalls. 

The Barracuda solution has a one-off cost of EUR 3,000. On a yearly basis, with it you have extra expenses like Energize updates and Instant Replacements and Network Security CloudGen Firewall, including the monthly fees.

I would most definitely recommend this solution to other people.

Overall, I would rate the Barracuda solution F80 version an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

It is used to secure our local area network and provide VPN access for outside connections. We have its latest version.

Its ability to block incoming attacks is valuable. Its logging, traffic monitoring, and VPN capabilities are also valuable. 

The biggest issue that I have with this solution is that it is not super intuitive. Once you know what to do, things make sense, but you can't just open the program and start doing things. It would be great if there was a little bit more guided usage inside the program.

We got it around the end of 2018. So, it has been about two and a half years.

Its stability is great.

Its scalability is great. Currently, we have about 20 users. The model that we have handles up to 3,000 users. So, we won't have to scale it soon. As we get new employees, we will scale it up, but at this time, we don't have any big plans.

I have called their tech support a lot. They are great.

We had a SonicWall Firewall in place before this.

Its initial setup was of middle complexity for me. Some parts of it were really straightforward, but there were a couple of complex things. Most of it was straightforward, but the complex things were pretty complex.

We did it in-house, and we also had the company's tech support for a couple of items, but most of it was done without tech support on hand. It took two days for everything.

In terms of maintenance, I manage it myself, but it is not something that has to be managed every day.

Its licensing is on a yearly basis. There is an upfront purchase price, and there is also an annual maintenance fee. There are no additional fees.

I would advise others to make sure that they understand their network before trying to set it up. They should understand what they want the firewall to do and make sure that they know what needs to get through the firewall.

I would rate Barracuda CloudGen Firewall an eight out of ten. I am very happy with this solution.

The ease of use is very valuable, and Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is very responsive. When you make any changes, it works instantly. Additionally, they have a very responsive customer service and support team.

The UI can be improved because it looks very old and complicated.

We have been using the solution for approximately four years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have had a good experience with customer service and support.

The initial setup is a bit complex.

The solution is priced reasonably.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. It could be priced similarly to competitors like Foritnet.