"When it comes to the integration among Cisco tools, we find it easy. It's a very practical integration with other components as well."
"The most valuable feature would be ASDM. The ability to go in, visualize and see the world base in a clear and consistent manner is very powerful."
"The Adversity Malware Protection (AMP) feature is the most valuable. It is also very easy to use. Every technical user can operate this solution without any difficulty. The dashboard of Cisco Firepower has every tool that a security operator needs. You can find every resource that you need to operate through this dashboard."
"Another benefit has been user integration. We try to integrate our policies so that we can create policies based on active users. We can create policies based on who is accessing a resource instead of just IP addresses and ports."
"The feature set is fine and is rarely a problem."
"The most valuable feature is the Intrusion Prevention System."
"The features I've found most valuable are the packet captures and packet traces because they help me debug connections. I like the logs because they help me see what's going on."
"IPS and Snort are very important because they also differentiate Cisco from other vendors and competitors."
"The only firewall able to monitor traffic from a CCTV network. Can detect unauthorized devices plugged into the network, which standard firewalls can't do."
"It has been stable so far."
"The ease of use in the GUI itself is the most valuable feature. The GUI is really the best part of it. We like the traffic rules so we can control who can get to what. It's easy to determine the flow of the traffic itself so we aren't having to guess through command lines and reading out basically command-driven output. It's just a very easy-to-use interface. The interface is the best part of the product."
"The firewall appliance itself is the most valuable feature."
"The solution is easy to manage. Kerio Control is unique compared to other firewalls because it has been around since 2000 when we switched and the name it started with was WinRoute, and then later became Kerio Control. It evolved over time and it is more of a proprietary firewall on its own and has been developed through open source."
"I love the VPN that we set up. A few of us have it on our computers so that if we leave, we can still access the stores. And we can work from home if needed. When I sign into that Kerio VPN, it links me like I'm sitting in the store. It puts me in our secure network so that I can sign on to each individual store and I can run numbers... If I have to work from home, it's so much faster than the way we used to do it."
"The installation is straightforward."
"I have found the most valuable features of Kerio Control to be the IPS and firewall."
"It is very comprehensive and simple. It has all the active protections. It's updated. We love that you can set how often it is updated so you can work what is right for you. A large company with a lot of bandwidth can update the virus definitions and security definitions hourly, if they want. A smaller site that's remote, where maybe updating the definitions will eat into the bandwidth, we can schedule those more to go later at night. It's very flexible and works for us in all types of situations. This is great because then we don't have to learn seven different products to be able to work with seven different scenarios."
"I like intrusion detection and prevention and bandwidth management. The routing part is also awesome. It is a good firewall. We never had a major breach from outside. We've never been impacted by ransomware, and our systems have never been infiltrated."
"The Firepower FTD code is missing some old ASA firewalls codes. It's a small thing. But Firepower software isn't missing things that are essential, anymore."
"One of my colleagues is using the firewall as an IPS, but he is worried about Firepower's performance... With the 10 Gb devices, when it gets to 5 Gbps, the CPU usage goes up a lot and he cannot manage the IPS."
"Deploying configurations takes longer than it should."
"The price and SD-WAN capabilities are the areas that need improvement."
"Web filtering needs improvement because sometimes the URL is miscategorized."
"They need a VTI. I know it's going to be available in the next software version, which is the 6.7 version. However, the problem with that is that the 6.7 is going to deprecate all the older IKEv1 deployment tunnels. Therefore, the problem is that we have a lot of customers which are using older encryptions. If I do that, update it, it's not going to work for me."
"I would like to see improvement when you create policies on Snort 3 IPS on Cisco Firepower. On Snort 2, it was more like a UI page where you had some multiple choices where you could tweak your config. On Snort 3, the idea is more to build some rules on the text file or JSON file, then push it. So, I would like to see a lot of improvements here."
"The performance should be improved."
"Licensing is not cheap."
"They have a very good technical support team, but I think there are some communication issues due to language differences."
"I would like to be able to automatically send email from Kerio Control and have it tell me what my external IPs are, because on one of my lines I have a fixed IP address and on the other it is variable. If there were a permanent way for me to figure out, "Okay, my current external VPN and my firm IP is this," it would help. I need to know the IP address to connect with the VPN and, at the moment, one of the lines sometimes changes its IP address without me knowing it. It's a hassle to figure out what it is."
"The antivirus seemed to be a bit laggy on the connection so I disconnected that. It's definitely good. The only issue we've had with any sort of cyber attack seemed to be coming from a couple of distinct locations, people trying to get into known ports on remote desktops and stuff like that. The fact that we can block all that traffic is just great. It simplifies it."
"The VPN features are the ones that we really like, but we are using a VPN client to be able to use them. We would like to have an SSL implementation for this same feature so we don't need to install anything on the client side. That's a feature I really miss and that should really be embedded in the product. We really would love to use it via a web browser."
"If you have to dive deeper into the firewall or any other features, then you really have to read up a bit about how to set it up properly. Some of my colleagues, in the beginning, jumped in and made a bunch of rules but then it got really messy. If Kerio had a template or guidelines for best practices, at the beginning, that would really help. With Kerio Control it's basically 'find out for yourself.'"
"The one thing that did put me off of the solution was that, after they were taken over by GFI, the licensing and a few other items have gotten very complicated."
"After the takeover by GFI, one of the things that Kerio built was MyKerio environment. This has not been very reliable because I get many messages that MyKerio is not functioning. For some reason, there are things that they changed and it is not very reliable at this moment, instead I have to connect to the firewall to see what is happening."
"One of the problems we do have causes problems with the VPN. The software slows the throughput down too much. You could have a one-gigabit connection from the internet, and it slows it down to the area of upload and download is extremely slow. There's too much content filtering at that point."
"The overall speed needs improvement. Internet connectivity speed needs to be improved somehow."
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Hillstone T-Series is ranked 32nd in Firewalls with 2 reviews while Kerio Control is ranked 9th in Firewalls with 33 reviews. Hillstone T-Series is rated 7.0, while Kerio Control is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Hillstone T-Series writes "Customizable reports with advanced threat protection". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Kerio Control writes "Through the ease of how quickly we could roll out the VPN to everybody, we had whole companies remotely working overnight". Hillstone T-Series is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Hillstone E-Series, Cisco ASA Firewall, Sangfor NGAF and Palo Alto Networks WildFire, whereas Kerio Control is most compared with pfSense, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM and OPNsense. See our Hillstone T-Series vs. Kerio Control report.
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