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.

We primarily use the solution specifically for the security of our environments.

The is SIEM is very valuable for us. 

The dynamic VPN is great.

Their GPS possibilities and the security that it has, especially the SD-WAN functionality, is very good.

There is always room for improvement on the solution. 

Their client VPN is not always working that well, so on computers specifically that could be something to change.

It is pretty expensive, but I think all of the solutions are, so it's something that's expected.

There are some bugs that are in the program. Occasionally when there are updates, there's a bug or two that you might find that cause issues. There was a major issue for a while, and I don't know if it's fixed yet with a third-party VPN provider.

If you have another brand of VPN where you have to put an SSL VPN between two devices, Barracuda doesn't support that at a certain point. You can't actually build the VPN between Barracuda and a different device of a different brand.

I've been dealing with the solution for five years.

The stability of the solution isn't ideal. There are bugs and issues with updates occasionally.

The scalability of the solution is excellent. You can really scale and copy content and update and deploy centrally.

We've contacted technical support a lot. They used to have really, really good technical support. Lately, however, it's a bit less impressive than before. I've heard this from my technicians. It used to be a lot better.

The initial setup is straightforward, however, much like every firewall, there's a lot that can go wrong. You need some decent knowledge of the product. It is complex for somebody who is starting with it and has never used it before. However, it's fairly easy to manage via the control center. It's a pretty easy firewall to work with.

The solution costs more than 800 Euros to purchase an F18, which is an entry model, and then another 500 Euros for instant replacement, and 500 Euros for energized updates. The total package would be around 1,900 Euros for a five-year license and all updates for an entry model.

We are a Barracuda partner.

We have firewalls in all of our data centers and have a total of around 200 firewalls.

I would advise others that it's really a good product for SD-WAN, and for security. I would advise them to consider other products as well. Companies should certainly consider it for security features. For us, it's probably more of an SD-WAN product to really set up good connections between sites, but not a really in-depth security product per se. If a company needs more security, they should look at and compare different products that may really focus more on the security aspect. The solution has far fewer features than Sophos, for example, which is more security-driven.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten because it offers SD-WAN functionality and an easy zero-touch deployment. If you have a lot of sites and you need to connect them to each other, it's a really good product.

Our primary use case is protecting companies from hackers. Everyone is vulnerable and it's a challenge to protect everything. 

Improvement should focus on fixing vulnerabilities. One of the issues with firewalls is that they don't dynamically update. If you experience an attack it can take a very long time to find a solution. It's the same issue with the Microsoft operating system which has all kinds of vulnerabilities and they put patches on to fix them. Firewalls are similar. 

It would be great to see a sharing of information but this is unlikely to happen. Everything in the industry is proprietary. It's similar to Dell computers, everything is proprietary and Barracuda is the same. They want to protect what they're doing with the firewall and so they don't want you to know how they work. For the user, there are tech people like network managers and security managers who won't share information about their vulnerabilities so you'll never know what's wrong. You know enough to use the product but not enough to enable you to solve the real security issues. 

At some point, they'll probably need to develop frequency hopping to make hacking more difficult. 

Scalability is always good because the company wants to be able to handle large customers. They can deal with both small businesses and massive companies. The ones I've worked for had thousands of computers. There are people still running Windows XP and Windows 10 and then you've got Mac users and cell phone connections. Scalability is there but it's a lot of work.

Technical support is quite poor, similar to Cisco. Technical staff are usually people that they've hired who are generally inexperienced. 

Initial setup is very complex and the firewalls can sometimes be unpredictable. A lot of this is connected to encryption. Every bit of encryption slows things down but if it's too light there's not enough protection. 

All the firewall companies such as Fortinet tend to go after certain markets. All the highly regulated industries such as banking and security exchanges have to follow a lot of rules. Firewalls can't provide them with all their specific needs. A lot of our time is spent trying to fix their problems. Our problem is that they all run different operating systems so it's difficult for them to do a good job at protection.

In another area, the more variation in equipment creates more issues. If you had a thousand computers, all identical and doing the same job, you wouldn't have as much trouble as you do when there are a thousand computers with 500 variations all doing different things; document control, engineering, facilities management and the most difficult to deal with is material management. 

I would rate this product a five out of 10. 

Our primary use case is the need for a VPN site to site connectivity across 30 or more sites. We employ the URL filtering, antivirus protection, malware, advanced threat protection, application control and identity fire walling. We're a customer of Barracuda and I'm a system administrator. 

I like the identity fire walling, malware protection and application control features. Those features provide us with the ability to give individuals or groups of users specific application access with the confidence that you have malware protection.

The solution could be improved with visibility into the traffic about what's happening at a given time. I think the analytics are weak and although it appears to be doing its job, it's difficult to know exactly what it's doing. 

I would like to see complete, real time and historical playback of all traffic and the amount of bandwidth utilized by each network.

I've been using this solution for three years. 

It's scalable but it's worthwhile scaling up physically before you need it. It means you basically have to overestimate the size of the appliance you're going to need. There isn't any trade up as you go kind of plan. If you think you're going to need more horsepower, you need to plan for that in advance so you're buying up more than you'll end up using. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

I think the technical support is very good, I haven't had any problems with them. 

The initial setup was a little complicated and it required an implementation strategy. You need to plan your VPNs and fail-over capabilities, the method or the order in which you build in your additional network settings is very critical. If you don't do it in the right order, nothing works and you have to restart the box which nobody wants to do. 

The licensing cost varies according to the size of the box. The 600 series is about $USD 10,000 a year and the 80 is $400 a year. There's a big difference.

If you're going to need advanced visibility into new areas, then you should plan on purchasing a third party product to be able to capture everything and you will then need to build that cost in. If you don't do that, you're just not going to have that visibility.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

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.

Our company installs and maintains solutions, mainly firewalls, for clients. We are resellers and I'm a consulting engineer. 

I like the use of the dashboard or the control panel to be able to manage multiple firewalls in either one entity or across multiples. The solution is fairly easy to configure.

I think the command line could be improved. In Cisco, Palo Alto and Juniper, the command line is a little more friendly. Everything I do is command line, I don't use a GUI interface. So you get used to using commands in the command line that have better command line tools.

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The stability is great, I haven't had any issues. 

Scalability is good - there are many different models and you can pretty much go from small shop to giant ISP.

I've used the technical support and they do a great job. 

I'm using a variety of solutions so my comparison would be with Cisco which I've been using for 15 years. I like their control panel very much and prefer it to the Barracuda control panel when it comes to managing multiple devices. 

Implementation is usually straightforward. 

It's worth getting somebody who knows the solution to install it. Each of the firewall solutions has its own little quirks, but there's not a big difference between all of the upper level solutions - Barracuda, Juniper, Palo Alto, Cisco - they're all very similar and all do roughly the same thing. We generally recommend Barracuda to our clients. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We use barracuda firewall as edge router connecting to our ISP modem. we turn on firewall with IP, port, applications, web filtering. We also use its VPN site-to-site and client to site. 

What I like best about this product are the support and the features.

The interface should be more user-friendly and it should be easier to configure. Its configuration are divided per module/service. You will have Firewall service, VPN module and others service. Each services are under 1 server tree. You have to configure at different tabs to make it functions which I found easy to get confused. There are no wizard for guided configuration. You have to depend on their manual at barrcuda campus. Fortunately the manual is quite comprehensive.

The inclusion of a load-balancing capability in the future would be helpful.

I have been using Barracuda CloudGen Firewall for about a year.

This is a stable firewall solution.

This product is easy to scale.

The support is okay but the response time is quite long.

cisco, out of support and pricing

The initial setup is difficult and the deployment took a few days.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to do a proof of concept first, to make sure that it meets the requirements.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Barracuda is our main firewall solution in our headquarters.

The interface is very user-friendly and it is quite easy to use.

Technical support could be more reliable and more professional.

I would like to see better support for switching between internet devices.

I have been using Barracuda CloudGen Firewall for more than three years.

The stability is okay and we haven't had any issues.

Technical support used to be at a very high level but it is now a bit less so. Regardless, the support is still quite efficient compared to other companies. It depends on who picks up the phone and who takes the task. There are times where the quality is poor and others where all of our questions are answered in a few minutes and it feels good.

This past November, we extended our support for an additional three years.

The price of this solution is comparable with similar products of similar quality.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to first discuss the environment and task with the Barracuda engineers.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.