Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall Reviews

Our use cases involve deploying the Forcepoint solution, which includes installing the SMC server, management server, log server, as well as physical appliances and designing the clustering of Forcepoint.

Forcepoint is a good solution because it has a central server that serves as a management console. You can manage 100s of firewalls from this single console. Additionally, a key advantage is that Forcepoint provides VPN services as part of its basic subscriptions. It is not necessary to pay extra to use VPN services.

There is certainly room for improvement. In larger companies with extensive infrastructure, retrieving logs for a longer period of time can sometimes take a bit longer than desired.

In bigger companies with a larger volume of logs; it takes more time to retrieve them due to the increased amount of data.

I have been working with Forcepoint for about two years.

It is a very stable solution. If you set everything well, if your policy is well designed, it's stable.

Overall, I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. 

It is a very scalable solution. If you don't have enough capacity, you can easily double or even triple it. If you need to add extra Forcepoint devices due to insufficient power, it's just a matter of expanding the cluster. Additionally, the physical boxes can be set up as a hybrid cluster, which means you don't necessarily need the same expensive appliances. You can purchase more affordable ones and integrate them into the Acris cluster. Forcepoint's physical appliances can share and distribute the network traffic between them.

We have enterprise-level as well as small-sized clients. 

The customer service and support are quite good. They are very educated. I never had a case that I wasn't able to solve successfully. So, they are reliable. 

Positive

The initial setup is very easy because all you need to do is create a USB disk, which you can obtain from the management server. You configure it once. After that, you just connect the physical server to Ethernet, insert the USB disk, and turn it on. Everything else will be done. You configure it for the first time on the management server and then install it on the FlashDesk. After that, you simply connect the physical server to Ethernet, insert the USB disk, and turn it on. That's it. And everything else will be taken care of.

If you do a simple installation, just the physical setup, it's a matter of hours. For a single installation, for a small business or company where you have around 150 users on the network edge, one engineer is enough. Therefore, the time to deploy the solution depends on the size of the installation.

Moreover, some maintenance is required for the solution. One person or one administration is enough for maintenance. 

I would recommend the solution. Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten because there are disadvantages like only some logs for enterprises. It takes a bit longer for it.

The solution's most valuable features are reporting, support, and classification of cyber attacks.

They should provide more details on potential cyber-attacks over a dashboard or email for the solution. Also, they should include centralized dashboard configuration and management.

We have been using the solution for three years.

I rate the solution's stability an eight or nine.

I rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten.

The solution's technical support team is quite responsive and provides consistent support.

Positive

The solution's initial setup process is complex. It is challenging to identify new and existing systems.

We implemented the solution with the help of a system integrator.

The solution is expensive.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We primarily use it as a next-generation firewall. 

The application control is great.

The solution offers very good filtering. 

There's a sandbox that we can leverage. 

We have resources of XD1 to properly manage the solution. The security management center is one of the best parts of the product.

I found the initial setup process to be very simple and straightforward.

Technical support is quite good.

The capacity for reading the users in a domain and the capacity to integrate the solution with the active directory or any kind of directory services need improvement. 

You do need knowledge of the solution in order to set the product up properly.

I've used the solution for a very long time. I've used Forcepoint for ten years or more. 

The number of users depends on the customer environment. Typically, there are up to 5,000 users. 

At the moment, there are no plans to increase usage.

I've found the technical support to be helpful and responsive. They are good overall. 

I've worked with next-generation firewalls for ten years, so for me, the initial setup was simple. That said, analysts that have never worked with Forcepoint, will face a more complex setup process.

Licensing costs are paid annually. You pay standard licensing costs. There are no extra costs involved. 

We are Forcepoint partners. 

I deployed the latest version of the solution about a month ago.

For those that plan to implement this solution, I'd advise them to know their environment very well first in order to successfully implement the firewall. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We publish books and use Forcepoint Firewall as the first line of defense on VPN access.

Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall could improve with applying policies. Also, improvement with publishing websites and VPN agent.

The solution needs to add an antivirus profile and anti-spyware profile, not just policies and VPN.

Our company has been using Forcepoint Firewall for 5 years.

Forcepoint is a good, stable solution.

This solution is scalable. 

The technical support for Forcepoint is fine. They are polite and available twenty-four hours and usually resolve problems the same day.

The initial setup of this solution is easy. We only set up some of the policies.

Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is reasonable, it is priced the same as other firewalls. 

We evaluated Palo Alto, their main advantage over Forcepoint is that they have an antivirus profile and anti-spyware profile.

I would rate Forcepoint a 7 out of 10. I would recommend that anyone considering this solution to upgrade their software to have more advantages.

Many of our clients have a two-stage firewall. They use one vendor in the data center and another on-prem, so we have to choose between Forcepoint or Cisco. There are choices, but many of our clients have Forcepoint.

Configuration is not easy because it has an old-fashioned interface. The configuration interface is highly complex, and it's been the same for years. They have to change the interface.

The structure of the configuration interface isn't like Palo Alto or FortiGate where you can do everything from a single screen. With Forcepoint, you have to import or assign rules because it's working with SMC, the central firewall management. Also, you cannot communicate directly with the product. You have to communicate with the product through the management interface. 

The dashboard also should be updated. 

I'm the PS manager, and our team is working with many products, including an email gateway and Forcepoint Next-Generation Firewall. We've been using it for more than four years.

Forcepoint's stability is satisfactory, for the most part, but when you have a log increase, you will face issues. If the hard disk is full of logs, it won't accept any configuration. 

If you want help from the support desk, you have to contact tech support and ask them to access the product to go through more troubleshooting. It's the same with web, email, and DLP.

We use multiple firewall solutions, including Cisco, Palo Alto, and FortiGate.

Setting up Forcepoint is okay, but you have to import the device and establish tunnel communication between the device and the SMC or the central management team. Deployment takes about five days from beginning to final confirmation, and we have a team of about six people for managing Forcepoint. According to the policy, you have to do things according to the number of clients behind the firewall. It's not straightforward, and it depends on the number of parameters or assets as well as the configuration the customer requires.

The license is based on the number of clients behind the web gateway. If you increase the number of agents, the license will cost more. 

It is very simple, easy to use, and flexible. It is a top solution with a complete feature set. Its most valuable feature involves its environment. 

A pain point worth mentioning is the need of the customer or client to properly know the environment as it relates to the presentation of Forcepoint and to have a better knowledge of the product's implementation. 

We have been using Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall for six years. 

It's very stable product. 

We feel Forcepoint's scalability to be pretty easy and good. It works very well. 

We feel the product's technical support could be better, as this relates to the solution itself, to the installation of the product, and to having a proper understanding of the case. 

The initial setup of Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is not terribly complex. We are talking about three months at the intermediate level. 

While the deployment of a single firewall depends on the environment, this took us between two to five days. 

We employ more than 16 people on our staff for the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall has a good price. 

In addition to Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall, we evaluated the concurrency of Palo Alto's features. We feel that Forcepoint affords better centralized management than its competitors.

Our company makes use of every current version of Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall. 

Our clients who use Forcepoint run the gamut from small, medium to large businesses. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We had planned on using this product as our multi-tenant firewall. After one year, we stopped using it because there was a problem with supporting some of the protocols.

The most valuable feature is the console management. It is very good and the security was great.

The interface is not user-friendly.

We were told that we would receive training but it came late and we had already started to deal with the product, which ultimately caused problems because we did it incorrectly. If the vendor focused more heavily on training as opposed to implementation then it would be a big improvement.

The UTM features are missing.

Application filtering is supported at a high level, but not at a low level. If I want to allow access to Facebook, yet not allow the user to access videos, then I am not able to do it with this product. Essentially, I'm allowed to block but I'm not allowed to limit. With other vendors, I can impose limits.

They need to add support for the Routing Information Protocol, RIP.

There is no support for the Built.io NIC driver.

I had been working with the Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall for about one year.

We had Forcepoint NGFW running on a virtual machine and it was very stable.

From the design that we took, it had the ability to scale up to 250 clients. That was good for what we needed but we failed with the first customer and could not complete the implementation for the second one.

In our environment, we had ten users.

We contacted technical support but it was not the typical support situation where we opened a ticket and they responded. We were in contact with them directly. Because it was irregular, I cannot judge how good or bad the support would normally be.

We are currently using three other vendors including Check Point, Fortinet, and Palo Alto. These have always been there but we were hoping to add Forcepoint as another option.

The initial setup is complicated and difficult to do.

By comparison, we have a very large number of products implemented in our environment and we can deploy most of them ourselves.

The deployment took almost seven months and ultimately, we failed. During our work on the deployment, we had two people handling the maintenance.

We received assistance directly from the vendor. There were several people who took part in the implementation including five from our side, one from the vendor, and two from the distributor. The help that we received from them was awesome.

The distributor knows the product more from a theoretical point of view. When it comes to the hands-on experience, they know the basics. When the person from the vendor came, they knew more about the product but had no experience with the multi-tenant aspect. So, for the part that we needed, they were failing. We spent a lot of time and received help from different people, and it was still a failure in the end. We disposed of the product.

We paid for a subscription license, vendor support, and the training.

We are a large service provider and we are always looking for new solutions. We had evaluated solutions by Sophos and SonicWall, although we decided that we were going to try Forcepoint.

We would not say No to another try with Forcepoint if, for example, they come back to us with a new version in another year. It would have to have documentation to show that what we want to do is now supported.

We tried a few implementations and we did not have very much success because the interface is not user-friendly and the product is complicated. If we had the training on time then it may have been easy but that wasn't the case.

The biggest lesson that I learned from using this solution is that you can't trust what people tell you. When they say that they will take care of things and support it, that is not included.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to make sure that the training is completed first, ahead of trying to implement it.

I would rate this solution a four out of ten.

Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is mainly used for obligation redundancy, such as for latency distal and packet loss.

I have found that Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is easy to use, highly secure, and the main VPN tunnel is created automatically which is a benefit. 

I have been using Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall for approximately two years.

Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is stable.

The salability of Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is great.

We have three clients that are using this solution.

The support from Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is not good, their response is not quick, We have had to wait a while.

The initial setup of the Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall has areas that are difficult.

There is a license required to use this solution and we can purchase it for one, two, three, or five years.

I would advise others to check compatibility before implementing this solution.

I rate Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall a six out of ten.