SonicWall NSa Reviews

SonicWall prevents and restricts access to websites for employees as well as anyone who comes into the office.

Most firewalls have active/active high-availability mode. If I'm paying for two firewalls, why shouldn't AI utilize both? It would be better if SonicWall came with n active/active feature instead of active/standby.

I've been working with SonicWall NSa for more than five years.

SonicWall NSa is simple to scale. You can easily add more firewalls to the cluster.

SonicWall's sales support is much better than other vendors'. 

Deploying SonicWall NSa is straightforward. A new user can easily configure the firewall. You can usually complete the deployment within a day. Setting up the prerequisites takes about two hours and then it takes some time to deploy the policies. That varies depending on what the customer wants. 

Maintenance is primarily configuration-related stuff, and our customers have their own engineers, but we give them advice. One engineer can maintain the solution.

You don't need to pay an annual fee, but any cost matters to the customer. Let's say SonicWall is giving me a firewall at a certain price, while a FortiGate firewall costs the same but offers added features like free SSL and active/active. Then customers might think it's better to buy a FortiGate.

Competitors provide SSL encryption licenses for free, whereas SonicWall only provides two licenses by default, but you have to pay for the rest of the licenses.
However, when most customers go beyond 20 or so users with SSL licenses, they usually go with a dedicated appliance, so a firewall should provide at least 20 to 25 SSL licenses for free.

I rate SonicWall NSa eight out of 10.

We have installed this firewall appliance across cloud and on-premises environments, our clients primarily use the VPN functionality.

If a customer wants to use the firewall, they have to pay more money for the cloud. By having a firewall solution, they can configure the VPN through the firewall, enabling them to avoid the high costs. Once you deploy the firewall in the cloud solution, then you will get protection for the gateway as well.

We are a service-based company and have implemented over 200 appliances for our customers.

The VPN functionality and intrusion prevention service (IPS) are the most valuable features.

I am a technical engineer, I have complete knowledge of SonicWall. I can do all of the configurations for the firewall. We are a service-based company and I handle the different solutions. If they need any requirement or they any action on the firewall then I can do that myself. 

The only thing that needs improvement is the VPN because we need to pay to connect the points.

I have been using SonicWall for 5 years.

We have found the NSa appliance to be stable and is comparable to FortiGate.

We have expanded the solution with several of our customers and this worked great. We have over 200 customers who use SonicWall.

Level 1 and 2 support issues are handled by our in-house team, but for more complex, level 3 issues we utilise the vendor. The call response is great.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We are a service-based provider and implement in-house.

We also implement similar appliances from Fortinet and Sophos.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. It's a good security product, so I wouldn’t give it a lower rating.

We use the product for a lot of things, so it's hard to talk about an individual use case.

The solution seems to help with any intrusion.

I like all the features. The global filtering and the content filtering are great. It's not always intuitive, however, you can usually figure it out. It's really handling all of our firewall needs.

It's stable.

The solution can scale. 

The user interface could be better. 

I've been at the company for about two years and have used the solution since my arrival.

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable. As long as we maintain patching, we're good.

The solution has been scalable.

About 150 people are using it in our organization. 

I'm not sure if we have plans to increase usage at this time. 

We have been very satisfied with the technical support. 

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution. this product was in place when I arrived at the company. 

The product was already set up when I got here, so I can't speak to the implementation process.

You only need one person to handle deployment and maintenance tasks. 

We've had it for quite a while and therefore must find it to be quite cost-effective. 

I'm not familiar with the licensing aspects of the solution. 

I'm a technical person. I don't care about the cost.

We have a very old SonicWall NSa. That's why we're looking to upgrade.

I'd advise new users to just learn how to work around the interface. That's my one complaint. It's sometimes a little cumbersome to use the UI.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

SonicWall has USCS and anti-virus at the gateway level. Everything is filtered, and if it detects an intruder, it drops the line.

We have security as a service, and they make recommendations about adding to the denylist and other things. That part could be more accessible and more user-friendly. I'd like to see SonicWall add a user-friendly interface where our internal team can drag and drop everything. We get the IOCs from the security companies, so these things can be filtered and blocked at the gateway level. They could add a feature where our team uploads the IOCs in an Excel spreadsheet instead of entering them in one at a time. 

We've been using SonicWall for almost seven years.

Yeah, it is much stable and we have been using NSa the previous version before also, the old device. It's all so far okay. It's stable only.

We could expand by another 20 percent, and the product would still cover us. It shouldn't be a problem. We haven't faced many challenges. It's a gateway-level firewall product, and we have 140 users.

SonicWall support is good.

We used Cisco a long time ago, but we moved to SonicWall almost eight years ago.

Setting up SonicWall isn't that complicated, but you need to know the scope — what's allowed and what isn't. But it's not as complex as Cisco. The deployment takes a couple of days, but we could probably do it faster. We upgraded from the older version of SonicWall NSa to the latest appliance in less time. 

It doesn't require a large team for maintenance. If we can manage it, anyone can. We only have three people on our team, and we can manage it without issue. 

We used the local redistributor here in Bahrain. They were knowledgeable and had SonicWall experience, so they didn't face much of a challenge. It was straightforward. The only difference is that we went with high availability — two devices. 

We have a yearly license. SonicWall's price is better than other vendors. We get a discount of about 15 percent off the initial cost.

I rate SonicWall eight out of 10. I recommend it. If you implement SonicWall, it'll be a smooth journey.

We use this solution for the VPN and to give permissions for on-premises access.

We're using the latest update.

The solution is deployed on-premises. There are two people using this solution in my organization.

SD-WAN is a good feature.

We also use the Sophos Firewall for web configuration, which we don't have in SonicWall. Only Sophos has those options. If SonicWall included that feature, that would be a benefit for us.

We have configured radius configuration. I would like to see an in-built authentication feature that would authenticate results and directly communicate to the cloud. Right now, we have a third party server for that. We are manually configuring it.

If anything goes wrong, sometimes we are unable to bring up that MPS configuration immediately. Our main VPN connection is always authenticated with the MFA option itself. When that happens, we have to revert those changes back as LDAP authentication. That isn't a good recommendation for our organization for VPN purposes. Anybody can connect directly, so they won't get two-factor authentication. It would be great for us if that was an in-built feature included in the Azure authentication.

I have used this solution for more than six years.

It's straightforward. There wasn't any kind of complexity. Deployment took one hour.

I would rate the setup as 4.5 out of 5.

We do the maintenance ourselves. Whenever there's any kind of patch release or upgrade release, we do the maintenance from our side. We have a dedicated team for maintenance.

Deployment was done in-house, but we did take some help from SonicWall.

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

I would recommend that product. If those small features were included, it would be a good, all-in-one product.

SonicWall NSa can be used as a perimeter and ELAN firewall.

The solution has many useful features, such as content management, user management, user filtering, and domain controller connectivity mapping.

The reporting and monitoring are a bit complex and should be easier in SonicWall NSa because other firewalls I have experienced have been more simple, such as Palo Alto. We are able to receive a clear view of our network. As a general user with little experience, it would be difficult for them to handle.

I have been using SonicWall NSa for approximately seven years.

I have found SonicWall NSa to be stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have approximately 180 users using this solution.

The support of the solution has been good. We normally go through our partner support but if anything is outside the limits of their knowledge then it gets passed onto the SonicWall support.

The installation is not easy, you should have a basic understanding of your network and what your requirements are. Generally, the implementation is done by the vendor. We have an external party who used to do the basic configuration. However, the new generation firewalls do not take much time and are easier.

We used an outsourced vendor for the implementation of the solution. 

We have approximately two individuals that do the maintenance of the solution.

There is a license required for this solution and you can purchase a one, two, or three year term. Typically businesses choose the one year subscription and then later choose the three year licensing option if they are satisfied.

I have evaluated Palo Alto firewalls.

I would recommend this solution.

I rate SonicWall NSa a seven out of ten.

I walked into a job where we had an end of life ns2400 that was a mess. Coming from a Meraki environment there was a learning curve on how to navigate the sometimes overly complicated user interface. Tasks I should have been able to complete in 10-15 minutes took longer and I bounced between menus to hash out NAT rules and port forwarding.

There is no Network Engineer on site, and there are too many piecemeal options to realize the full effect of the firewall's capabilities.

Support is usually good when it comes to helping out with issues. Once the matrix is learned, it becomes a much better tool, but the learning curve is pretty large.

Port forwarding could use streamlining. Otherwise, once you learn the user interface, the capabilities of the firewall are good.

It is a brilliant product. It is a Unified Threat Management (UTM) system. It has got about 11 security services that take care of your perimeter security. It takes care of any kind of cyber threats that could come in. 

It takes care of creating VPNs between two SonicWalls instantly and very easily. It has got spyware in it as well as a firewall. It has also got a gateway antivirus and an application firewall that can block things from outside.

It would be useful to have an application firewall that prevents the outside world from seeing your private IPs. You don't need to publicize your private IPs to the outside world, and you can create a barrier, like a proxy server.

I have been using this solution for four years. We are using SonicWall NSA 3600.

It is very stable.

The product that we have is not scalable. You'll have to buy a firewall model that suits your requirement with a certain amount of growth built into it. They have other products that are scalable, and they are the 9600 series ones.

Currently, we have about 300 users. We plan to keep using this solution.

I have contacted their technical support, and I have received good support.

Its initial setup is absolutely straightforward. It took less than an hour. There were no issues.

I did it myself. Currently, we are maintaining it ourselves. We are not getting it done from anyone outside, but we have the subscription for SonicWall so that the security areas are taken care of by them.

Normally, when we buy any product, we buy it with a five-year service built into it. Later on, depending on the growth of the organization, we go for a new one or an upgrade.

We've been using SonicWall since 2006. When we decided on SonicWall, I had tried another product for 15 days, but it was not serving the requirements that we had. Therefore, we decided on SonicWall.

I would very much recommend this solution to others. I would rate SonicWall NSA an eight out of ten.