Barracuda CloudGen Firewall Reviews

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. 

Much quicker deployment, ease of troubleshooting and better cost compared to our previous solution.

• Ease of use and troubleshooting.
• Very easy to quickly identify issues and resolve them.
• Add-on features such as Virus Scanning, ATP, and web filtering - These features add another level of protection and block malware before it gets to the end user. 
• Single device, multiple functions - I do not need to purchase a web application firewall, a proxy server, a VPN device and so many others because these are all built in to this one device.
• TINA (Transport Independent Network Architecture) VPN features - Allows automatic VPN configuration with little or no input from the tech. Drag and drop lines between Barracuda units and the VPN is automatically built.

Can be underpowered if you choose to use all available add-on features. Just be careful when sizing your unit. Make sure you take into account what features you will be turning on, and work with your sales rep to get the model that can handle that load.

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

I would rate the technical support nine out of 10.

This product was much easier to deploy, manage and troubleshoot than my previous solution.

Straightforward, very intuitive.

Pricing is good. Licensing is pretty much automatic if using Control Center.

Cisco and Fortinet.

I rate it a nine out of 10 due to its ease of installation, great technical support, very intuitive user interface, and numerous features.

Go through the training course.

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 use it for priority level security, to manage single sign-on applications and user base policy from a single firewall device. We use it for SSL inspection, for SSL site-to-site, for point-to-site, and for user base policy allocation.

I'm a network and cyber security consultant. This is not only for my offices, I have deployed it for many large enterprises where customers are remotely accessing their applications. We can define user application-level access, so our customers can work anytime from anywhere.

Live monitoring of what is happening inside and with the interfaces, either ingress or egress - this is a good feature of the device.

Secondly, most people use enterprise applications remotely, and there is no license for SSL VPN, or in other words point-to-site. There is no limit. On other devices there is a specific limit and you have to pay per use for SSL VPN.

Single sign-on is also good. If you are accessing your corporate firewall from your home, during that time there is an integration with the AD. You can use your AD's password to access your SSL VPN. It's not like if you buy a traditional SSL VPN. You have to define a specific password for your remote client application but there is no requirement of defining a specific password - which you would have to request from your admin - or to buy a token which can generate a password for your integration. You can directly integrate with your AD. If you change your password on the AD side, your client-to-VPN password also gets changed. You can integrate all your passwords from a single console. The admin doesn't has to change your password, it's a single sign-on.

It's a little bit complex in terms of handling. If you implement a change, there is a specific point where you have to commit it. It's not like you just push a button and it's always committed. If you don't know to check whether your commit command has been executed or not... that is something Barracuda needs to work on.

Secondly, when you do any commit, it locks your next access. If you are making a change to the device, from the security standpoint it's fine, but from the admin side it's not good. When you make changes, after each and every one it becomes locked.

It's really a good and stable product. I have worked with multiple firewall products and I can say that this is really very robust, good hardware. It's also good on the cloud side. I have deployed it on both sides, either on the public cloud or a virtual space, or a physical environment.

No scalability issues at all. When you buy this product it gives you multiple options: What can the maximum number of employees be, what can the number of concurrent users be. It's really good, there is no problem with the usability.

One of the most important parts is that there is auto-upgrade of the hardware every fourth year.

I would say technical support is lacking. They don't have strong technical support; their abilities are not so good. The support is not fabulous, it's okay. They need to improve their support.

I have used Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, Palo Alto, Sophos Cyberoam, Dell SonicWall, and Juniper (both SRX and NetScreen).

One of the reasons I switched to Barracuda is that I was looking for real-time monitoring and Barracuda is good for that.

Secondly, SD-WAN. The first time I used this a question which occurred to me was regarding software-defined WAN technology. I wanted to go to a software-defined WAN and Barracuda have a specific protocol called TINA (Transport Independent Network Architecture). You can create a master policy over the internet and it allows you to do Quality of Services on top of it. It's really helpful for me.

When I saw that this box comes with software-defined WAN technology, along with all the firewall options, the specific user-level deep monitoring and real-time monitoring, that made me more curious about it.

Initially, it's complex when no one is familiar with it. The first time you use it, it is a really complex solution.

We have spent a good amount of time to "get in" to this box.

Pricing and licensing are fine. It's worth the value because if I buy any other product, every four years I have to replace my hardware. But with Barracuda I get a free hardware upgrade. Today I'm using Xbox. After four years I can take another Xbox or a Ybox.

When I initially started using it I was just an end-user, a technical consultant. And one of my customers said to me, "I want these and these features." I searched a number of products with respect to the customer's requirements and we chose Barracuda. I then signed on to be an OEM partner with Barracuda, about four years ago.

It's good to go with Barracuda. If your work is only on the internet, you can go with this product. If you want to create your own MPLS network, or you are more focused on application performance over the internet, you can go with Barracuda.

I would not blindly say go with any given product because there are multiple factors to consider. For example, there is no license for SSL. When you have a greater number of remote users, and you don't know what kind of scalability you will need, that is another thing. If you have multiple offices, all inter-connected via the internet, you want a single management console through which you can manage all you firewalls. In that case, Barracuda could be a good option.

If you want to buy a product which can challenge the industry-recognized leaders, like Palo Alto or Check Point, you should consider this product.

I rated it at nine out of 10. It's not a 10 because of their training - it takes a long time to understand this product. Also, it locks after each and every change, which is problematic. Also, when you login from some sources, there is no feature which can log you out after a certain timeout.

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.

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.

Since updating single boxes or large amounts of systems only requires a couple of mouse clicks, it allows us to keep the firewalls up to date, both for firmware and on fixes, in demanding locations around the globe. This process is such that we trust it to handle nearly impossible to reach systems too.

The real difference is the fact that it truly scales, and fully managing a thousand firewalls worldwide with a team of two is quite doable. Even with serious hardware failures, you can often still securely manage the system and analyze the issue at hand, or even fix certain issues. Other indispensable functions, are the full transparency of handled data, both real time and historical, the ability to create VPN tunnels in the blink of an eye, the multiple parallel VPN tunnels, and near infinite routing options.

Although IPv6 was implemented a couple of years ago in the Barracuda NG Firewalls, the real use of IPv6 is still rare. This means that the “real world exposure” of these parts is less than the IPv4 parts. This is obviously a general issue for security vendors.

None what so ever, we use these systems in critical 24x7x365 environments because of their stability and resiliency.

Barracuda offers a wide range of models ranging up to 40 GB sustained firewall throughput, and since all their systems work from a single image, I’ve never had an issue with scaling or migrating them.

The Barracuda NG Firewall, managed through the Barracuda Control Center thrives in large to very large environments. Unlike other vendors, the management really scales. Managing (all aspects) a thousand firewalls anywhere in the world with just a couple of engineers, is quit doable. The current practical maximum of firewalls to manage simultaneously is around 7,500, but that is quite beyond my scope.

Customer Service:

I’ve been in IT for nearly 40 years, and I’ve had my share of dealings with “service/support organizations”, often service/support was just the name of the department, but down the line it got a different meaning. Barracuda’s definition of support however extends every definition of the term to a new level.

These guys are accessible, no phone trees etc., they are polite, extremely knowledgeable, and customer oriented. Officially you need a subscription to be eligible for support, but I’ve never seen them turn their back on anyone. Barracuda Service is really Barracuda Service.

Technical Support:

There is not really a difference between customer service and technical support except maybe in the questions asked (and the people assigned to answer these questions).

Every user is entitled to full technical support which, as states, is unsurpassed in the IT industry.

I’ve been working with firewalls in small, medium and world scale solutions, since approx. 1994. and have dealt with a substantial amount of systems from number of vendors (like Check Point, Juniper NetScreen, Cisco PIX and ASA and some smaller ones).

Over the years, I’ve seen many sales guys promising “the world” but upon closer scrutiny actually offering very little. I must confess that I told the Barracuda (Phion back than) sales guy of my experiences, and his reply was; “you’re right, I’ll organize a phone conference with one of the developers”. My immediate reply was “Do these guys talk to mortals?”

After a very frank and open call lasting far beyond the one hour initially set, I was convinced that this product truly did stand out. Seven years of experience later, I’m even more convinced that this solution is unparalleled.

Let me rephrase, my “first setup” was complex, as the Barracuda NG firewall is different to others, but once you understand what you’ve got, and can get your head around it, it’s tremendously straightforward.

I’ve received full training of the Barracuda NG Firewall, and I’m the guy that designs the entire environment, and gets to setup the complex parts, and for the really insane tweaks, I can always count on the help of the entire Barracuda team. They are always reachable and will come over on short notice for special cases. These are the people who were part of team that build the systems back in the very early 2000’s and working with these guys is always a pleasure.

It is a real next generation firewall, if you’re looking for any run of the mill box and have little requirements, it’s probably not for you. If your requirements are more demanding and especially if you’ve got a number of locations, this is the product to consider.

The price itself is in the normal range, so the real benefit lies in the savings in management and amount of staff. Furthermore, Barracuda offers a so called instant replacement contract that not only entitles you to replacement of defective hardware, but also after four years enables you to replace the system with a brand new system for free.

As stated, I’ve worked with firewalls from different vendors, also in quite large environments, but they are no match for the Barracuda NG Firewall, not by a long shot. The vendors were:

• Check Point
• Cisco PIX and ASA
• Juniper NetScreen
• CyberGuard
• SonicWALL
• IIS

Although it is a truly great firewall it is certainly not a “run of the mill” product, and even if you have thorough knowledge of other firewall environment, don’t go in there without a good partner that will guide and support you.

Not really a Barracuda NG Firewall but a Barracuda rack mounted device (EON) that is capable of running the NG Firewall, next to instances of e.g. Web Application Firewall, Web Filters, etc., the sustained throughput on these boxes is around 250 GB.

Showing an F10, low-end, firewall and an F600, mid-range, model Barracuda NG Firewall

Just the first screen of a (demo env.) Barracuda Control Center showing the status of some firewalls

The Barracuda tool (NGEarth) that allows you to monitor in real time your VPN tunnels and system status (again demo)

Example showing traffic history (just one of the many screens.)

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.