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. 

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.

We use this firewall for application protection and SD-WAN gateway. It is deployed on-premises and in Azure.

Its stability and SD-WAN features are the most valuable.

The administration UI could be better. It should also have better application detection policies.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It is stable.

It is scalable.

It is superb. They are really good, and the support is above the industry standard.

It has a medium difficulty level. The deployment duration depends on the specific needs of the client.

We are an integrator, so we are deploying these machines for customers. We have four people for its deployment.

I would recommend this solution. We plan to continue using it. 

I would rate Barracuda CloudGen Firewall a nine out of ten.