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 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.

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. 

While using Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, we encounter issues with VPN profiles for Windows. It could be improved.

The biggest downside is that it is quite an expensive product. So a little bit better pricing or some options for a little bit cheaper device would be nice. They are quite complex to get up and running for anything beyond a basic installation. They could do something better with their initial setup wizard to make things just a little bit easier. Besides that, they're pretty good as far as I'm concerned.

It would be better if they had a trace and trap feature. It's hard for me to say anything bad about Barracuda. This is because we had a firewall go down in the town of Kirkland Lake, and it was a blown-out port, and they had an instant replacement. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall should work a little bit more with the logs so that, in our company, we can generate a little bit more reports and get a bit more statistics, which would be fine for us. The firewall's functionalities are okay, including network and security. The tool should improve its reporting and security areas, which are the only areas of concern related to the product.

We need high availability and load balancing. The product does not enable load balancing. We are looking for alternate solutions. We have multiple VPN channels with clients and sites. We need to ensure that the traffic is optimized so that the full bandwidth of the existing network is utilized. If the link goes down, the traffic must be routed without any downtime in the connection.

The solution's interface is complex at the moment. It could be more user-friendly.

The technical manuals, at times, have images that don't match the actual screens and are not always as clear as they could be on the configuration. This requires a call to their very good support department.

The unit seems to be handling our 150MB pipe okay, but logger refresh leaves a bit to be desired.

A rule for email announcements, when configured hits occur, would be a great improvement for a more efficient experience.

If I compare it to other firewalls like Kerio Control, I would say that, probably, the GUI/Configuration Menu is something that could be more user friendly.

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.

To start working with spam, it takes a while because the product has to see that multiple emails are coming in with all the spam. If it could reduce that amount of time, then we would reduce the amount of users who are receiving spam.

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

The usability for the administrator's experience needs improvement. My system administrator has some questions about its overall connectivity and flexibility.

I would like to see UI improvements in the next release.

The problem we found was with the issue of configuration. Our engineers are working with some other brands, they have knowledge of other brands. With Barracuda it's a matter of translating the comments. So maybe one company calls something a "black box" and with Barracuda they call "black" "dark." So it's a matter of getting to know it.

Technical support could be more reliable and more professional.

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

Sometimes we have a need for detailed reports. Barracuda NG Firewall does not have a reports module and uses a satellite application (Barracuda NG Firewall Report Creator). In some cases, this report is uncomfortable to use.

The GUI can be confusing and overwhelming at times.

I would like to see a more user-friendly dashboard and an easier interface. 

It is already a complete product.

We would like to see a solution that is focused on container deployment, which is very important right now. Clients are looking at those kinds of deployment more often, so it has become a center of focus.

Nothing much except some little buggy issue sometimes, such as unable to login using the default login when out-of-box and will required factory reset once again.

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