WatchGuard Firebox Reviews

The primary use case is it is a firewall solution. One of the major selling points was that WatchGuard does adapt in real-time as new threats are discovered, and they push out fixes in real-time.

A lot of our servers have been migrated to the cloud, so it is really our primary solution right now.

One of the things that it has done is we have been able to start cutting down on extraneous web traffic. We make sure that our bandwidth is being used for business functions rather than for downloading or streaming media files.

It very much simplifies my job. Before we got the WatchGuard solution, I was doing everything on a per machine basis. All of the security, firewall, and port security had to be done on the front-end before anything could go out. This could take hours to days depending on the system being used, and then it would have to be in the IT department getting provisioned. Now, the provisioning goes more toward what types of software are needed. We have it completely unified across locations with a security standard through the WatchGuard systems due to the roles that we've set up for the organization. We just set the same roles in place, then we are able to ensure that everything is uniform across all locations.

Productivity, especially within the IT department, has increased due to the time that we used to spend on each machine can now be spent on the network level. This allows us to turn our attention to other tasks, such as creating in-house systems, so we can roll out changes faster and be more responsive to the needs of our business.

One of the most valuable features is the Geolocation. Because we aren't a multinational corporation, it allows me to look at things which might be suspicious to make sure that they are legitimate transactions rather than people sniffing around the network.

I have found the reporting and management to be pretty useful a lot of times. When the reporting did come up short, it was due to a configuration error on my part. Anytime that I've had to look up historical information, I found that everything I have needed has been there and it has allowed me to piece together what happened.

We do a lot of work with cloud-based and Internet-based vendors. A lot of times when we are on the phone with them, I find that it is a bit more technical than they are used to when we are trying to set up specific exceptions to the firewall. We ask for the ports that it's going to use or the block of addresses that they're going to be going from. A lot of times the only thing that they have for us is the web address that they want me to whitelist. Unless I'm missing that functionality, it seems like it is looking more for those technical data points, essentially. A lot of times, I'm running into a problem where there's a lack of give and take between WatchGuard and me. We get it figured out eventually, but it would just be nice if there was a way to say, "We just want to whitelist this address."

It is a very stable solution. 

Once we had it set up the way we wanted, it seemed to be running extremely well.

For deployment and management, it's just me along with the reselling group (POA).

We have not reached any scalability issues, so far. We have used it in clinics as small as a few practitioners and ones that have more than 30 providers. We have never experienced any issues with the product slowing down or failing in any way.

There are five different users, I'm the main power user of it, and I essentially set up the rule sets and work to ensure that the system is delivering what is needed. The other users are more of administrative users who are viewing the web traffic within their own departments.

So far, I haven't needed to go to the solution's technical support.

We were just using on system firewalls. We were getting to the point where we needed to consider a network-based solution of a physical firewall. WatchGuard came highly recommended from our consultants when we partnered with POA.

At first, I did the guided set up where I chose the rules of what to block and what not to block. That was fairly simple. There are a few things that I had to go in and change. That took me a little bit of time to figure out. Overall, it was pretty simple. 

When logging in and registering it, I did run into an issue where I had to spend about an hour reading to try and figure out why I couldn't activate it. I contacted my reseller and they helped me with it.

The deployment took about two and a half hours.

Implementation strategy was more about my bosses wanting to get in, then set it up afterward. It was more about let's get it in place, get it working, and then we'll lock things down as we need to.

We have hubs in multiple locations. Our strategy for implementing these was once the first one was installed in our main location, then we had the role set up the way we wanted it for the entire organization. We used that to order additional Fireboxes and took them to our other locations. Those were preloaded with the same role sets and put online.

We used Pacific Office Automation. We had a very good experience with them. With the few bumps in the road that we had following the setup, we called them. We let them know what was going on and they helped us resolve the issues quickly.

It saves a lot of time. On a weekly basis, without having to do a per machine basis, it probably saves me about three and a half to four hours a week.

I think we might be subscribed to one or two of the premium features.

We were evaluating a Cisco solution as well. 

Take a look at the needs of your business and how reactive you need to have your firewall solution be. One of the major selling points for our corporate board was: As new threats come up, WatchGuard is constantly taking the information coming in and looking for a solution, then pushing it out. That was one of the major selling points for us. The field that we're in takes security very seriously. We wanted to make sure that we were protecting our client's information. When it came down to it, that was a major selling point for us.

There was a bit of a learning curve. Once I was in it for about a week or two, I found it simple and intuitive to use.

With the throughput, the only issues that we found were at the very beginning, and that was due to a misconfiguration on my part. There hasn't been a noticeable change in slow down from the throughput the way that some firewall solutions might cause. Now, my end users don't even realize that it is there.

We are not using the solution's cloud visibility feature.

Right now, we are on the base usage. It's a firewall solution for us and we haven't really had the chance to dig into the advanced features that much. I plan to expand how we use it in the future, as time allows.

I'm very happy with it so far. I need some more data points to really firm that up. However, at this time, what I'm basing the eight (out of 10) off of is the ease of use, the ease of setup, and its learning curve. Once you learn how to use the system, it is very well-organized. It does save us so much time. The drawbacks are just sometimes not having the technical information that we need in order to easily make connections with all of our Internet-based clients, but we can put the work in and still get it done.

It's our primary firewall. It's also our UTM device, so we have multiple security layers enabled on it.

We're using an M270 firewall with version 12.5.

With WatchGuard, I've got a lot of WebBlocker rules set up which help quite a bit, blocking a lot of suspicious and parked domains. Between WebBlocker, the Botnet Detection, the website reputation filters going, and IPS - which is one that is essential, but nobody really talks about a whole lot; between all those things working together, and even the antivirus, I feel our network is pretty clean. And if there is some suspicious activity, I think I have a better chance of being alerted to it. I've even been able to set up Application Control rules, so that something like Windows Update doesn't deplete too much bandwidth. There are whole bandwidth controls you can set up which aren't necessarily security-related, but they can help make sure that one particular function doesn't take up so much bandwidth that the users are affected. WatchGuard has layered security, but I also have other layers beyond that.

I wouldn't necessarily say it has simplified my job but I am very happy to have it. I'm very glad we went with WatchGuard. I was impressed with WatchGuard for a lot of other reasons like their education and training videos. They do a lot of little security announcements about what's going on with other companies in the industry, so that part has made my job easier. I wouldn't say it's made my job more difficult either. It has definitely made me feel more comfortable about the security here, but I wouldn't say it simplified things. We had a very simple firewall which was almost a small-business router. It had a little firewall screen with four settings on it that really didn't do a whole lot. So, I can't say WatchGuard simplified things for me. It's just we're much more secure and it hasn't overly complicated things.

One of my favorite features is the Geolocation service, where you can actually block specific activity or IP addresses registered to certain countries. For example, I don't want any web traffic from Russia or North Korea. I may even lock down certain policies down to "I only want U.S. IP addresses." I find that very useful. That was not a feature that was initially there for us. It was something WatchGuard released after we bought our first device with them and it is one I am very happy with.

I may want to only allow U.S. IPs onto a specific interface that I share files with, for security reasons, or I may know of a security issue in a particular country. I can just block that whole country for all my users. Or maybe I'm seeing a lot of malicious links coming out of South Korea, even, and I just say, "We don't go on a lot of websites there, let me just block that country completely," and if we do need to get on a website, I'll just make an exception. It improves security and helps block malicious links.

There's a little bit of a learning curve in getting everything working. But once you understand how all the pieces work, and the fact that you're using physical hardware with a web interface alongside a piece of software installed on your computer, and you learn what to do in each location, it's very user-friendly.

I like the management. There are some nice dashboards and other things to keep an eye on things. There are email alerts, once you get those configured. Once again, they're a little complicated to get set up, but once they work, they work well. Management is pretty easy. 

The version I'm on, 12.5, came out last week. I try to stay pretty current and they do add features and improve usability and functionality often. It's one thing I've been happy with. It's not like they say, "Here are the modules you bought with it four years ago and that's all you have." They're constantly adding, developing, improving. 

They've done a lot of work with their SD-WAN, which we do use, to have our old internet service with our new internet service. If anything goes down on a particular interface, I can have different rules applied. Most of my users don't even know when our primary internet goes down anymore. It does run slower on our backup, but they don't know the difference unless they're doing some kind of bandwidth-intensive function or streaming. I don't have to be here to do anything to switch it to our backup internet or to switch it back. They've developed that feature even more, to allow you to have different rules for different policies or different interfaces to behave differently, depending on what happens with either packet-loss or latency, with multiple internet sources. That is pretty helpful.

Reporting is something you've got to set up separately. It's one of those things that you've got to put some time into. One of the options is to set up a local report server, which is what I did. It's not great. It's okay. I've heard their Dimension control reporting virtual machine is supposed to be a lot better, but I haven't had the time our resources to set that up. Some of the stuff is a little complicated to get up and running. Once you do, it becomes very user-friendly and easy to work with, but I find there are some implementation headaches with some of their stuff.

I wish I had a contact at WatchGuard because there are a few things I'm not using. I'm not doing packet inspection because I know it's pretty intensive to install certificates on all my computers and have it actually analyze the encrypted traffic. That's something I'd like to do but I'd really like to talk to somebody at WatchGuard about it. Is that recommended with my number of users with my piece of hardware, or is that going to overload everything? I'm not using Dimension control. I'm not using cloud. If I had a sales rep or a support person that I could just check in with, that would help. Maybe they could do yearly account reviews where somebody calls me to say, "What are you using? What are you not using? What would you like more information about?" That sort of thing could go a long way.

They do a lot of education, but it's sent out to the masses. They have really good emails they send out which I find very valuable, talking about the industry, security events, and other things to be aware of. But there's not too much personal reaching out that I've seen where they're say, "Hey, how can we help your company use this device better? What do you feel you need from us?" That's my main recommendation: There should be somebody reaching out to check in with us and help us get more out of our device.

It's very stable.

I've only even had one update that I applied that caused problems, that I had to roll back. I don't recall any kind of issue where I had to reboot the device to fix something. Somewhere along the line, WatchGuard, with their free training and free training videos, had recommended setting up an automatic reboot once a week just to keep everything clean, fresh, and healthy. I set that up during to reboot every week during off-hours on the weekend and I've had almost zero problems with it. Even with the updates, as I said, I can only think of one instance where there was a problem. I had to roll the update back, which was very easy to do, and then wait until the update patch came out and fixed the problem. That only happened once.

I've been very happy with the stability and reliability of not just the device and the software, but WatchGuard as a company.

With my needs and my network, I feel we could add bandwidth and add users for a while, before we would run into any issues. It's scalable for my needs with my device.

I don't think I have used WatchGuard's technical support. If I did, it might have been once.

I haven't really needed it too much. As I said, they have some good YouTube videos that they put out themselves on setting up stuff. That's my first resource when I want to get into a new feature I'm not using. They've got pretty good notes in there, so when I update software on the device itself, I go through their installation guide or their admin guide for that version of the software and it's all pretty straightforward. It lays out the new stuff they changed and what you need to be aware of, so I haven't needed to bug them.

We didn't have anything like this before, so it's not necessarily saving me time, but it did add a whole other level of security to our network, which we really appreciate.

We had a small-business Cisco basic solution. They called it a security router, but it was just a small device that sat on the shelf and which mostly provided internet access. It had very simple firewall controls: two or three check-boxes to do basic filtering. So we did have something, but it was nowhere near the level of the WatchGuard.

We switched to WatchGuard because we did not have a UTM device like we do with WatchGuard. We needed to upgrade the old device because it wasn't performing well anyway. I suggested that we needed something more appropriate, or with more layers of security than what our other small, entry-level device was offering. We did review solutions from a few other firewall vendors and WatchGuard offered, in my opinion, the best protection for the cost.

The initial setup was a little bit of both straightforward and complex. I'm a technical person. I read an instruction manual before I do something, whether it's putting a piece of gym equipment together or implementing something like a WatchGuard firewall. I had gone through all of their admin guides and getting-started guides and recommendations. So it was pretty straightforward, but there were a lot of steps and a lot of things to work through.

Something as simple as email wasn't just set up by specifying the IP address of your email server. I had to enable a bunch of things on the web interface and then install the software on my computer and set it up as an email relay. That was the only way to get email alerts, which I found a little shocking because email alerts should be critical on these things. I guess bigger companies may have alert servers or Syslog servers or other things they're using. But we're smaller and we don't. So that was one thing that I found was a little more complicated than it should have been for the importance of the feature. And now I have a computer and a firewall and if one or the other isn't working, those email alerts don't work.

Our deployment did not take long. It was no more than a week or two. I did it pretty quickly. I convinced the owner why we needed it and why this was the right move. I wanted to make sure I implemented it quickly and that we got some benefits out of it right away. I didn't want to let it sit around. It took less than two weeks.

My implementation strategy was mostly what I mentioned above: Review all of the guides, all of the walk-throughs, a couple of tutorial videos, get a baseline of what I wanted to enable and how. Then I did it offline, as you would expect. I brought the device into my office, got it updated, got everything baselined and set up the way I needed it to start with. From there it was just switch out early in the morning before users were in the office. It was nothing too out of the ordinary.

For deployment and maintenance of the product, it's just me.

I did it myself.

I believe there has been ROI, with the level of protection and things that are being blocked that we're aware of. And there is just the peace of mind of knowing certain things.

Some of this I'm simplifying a little bit because, again, a lot of these things have been implemented over the last four-and-a-half years. I'm thinking now of other features I've implemented that I'm very proud of, like locking down remote access software so people can't just come and use any remote access software to get in or out of our office. There's a sense of security because I only allow the remote-access software that we pay for and use. I don't allow any other protocols to get through. It is making sure we don't have people who work here doing weird things, but it also makes it harder for other people to break in. Just that peace of mind and all the other layers we have working is worth the money, in my opinion.

We had a trade-in offer at the end of our first three-year term. As a result, we pretty much got a free device by buying the three-year subscription. It was around $3,000 for the three-years.

We probably looked at SonicWall and ForcePoint, but it's been a number of years so I don't recall much of that process.

Do your research. It's not impossible. Do things in a logical order and make sure you understand what you're doing and how you're going to do it. Once you understand it and get everything working the way you want, it does get very easy to use and work with from there. Once you get over the learning curve of how all the pieces work together, it's very easy, very user-friendly, very easy to update, and very easy to make changes and document those changes - all that good stuff.

I tend to buy the hardware platform that's like one level above where we think we absolutely have to be at a minimum, so the performance has been adequate or good. I've yet to hit an issue where I feel the device is slowing us down or causing any issues because of the performance of the device, itself. We're usually limited more by our actual bandwidth. It's been great as far as our network and needs go.

In terms of the extent to which we're using the product, six months ago when I renewed the second three-year term, the subscriptions had changed quite a bit from when I had my first three-year term. Now, I have a whole list of new subscription services or modules or layers that I have not started implementing. I got a couple of the new ones implemented, to get some of the benefit, when I first got this new device. But there are a few more I want to implement. One of them, is packet inspection, which is difficult because that can really bog down your device. I'd like to have Dimension control to get better reporting. There are a couple of other ones that I have not implemented because they're new for me and I just haven't had the time to work on them. Threat Detection and Response is one I'm interested in which I haven't time to implement yet. It involves me setting up a client in each one of my endpoints and it keeps track of unusual activity there. That's probably where I want to go next. Maybe even the Access Portal could be useful for me, to have a place for vendors or customers go to access things inside our network.

We've gotten more features for our money because there's a new security package which wasn't available when I first subscribed, and that included pretty much everything. I had paid separately for APT, Advanced Persistent Threat protection, on my old subscription. To get that now, it was cheaper to bundle it with their total threat package. That included a lot of things like DNSWatch, which I did set up to look for malicious DNS access requests throughout my network. It gave me intelligent antivirus. I believe there's some kind of DLP module, which is one I haven't spent any time on. Network Discovery is another one I haven't spent time on that I need to work on. All of those came as new features with the new hardware and with that new subscription. The Threat Detection Response is definitely something I didn't have access to before. For sure, in this second three-year term, we got a lot more value for the money with what WatchGuard offered us.

I would give WatchGuard an eight out of ten. There's a little bit of room for improvement but I'm very happy with WatchGuard. I think it's a good fit for me. I won't often give a ten, just on principle, unless I feel they deserve a 12. That's when I give a ten.

I've definitely said positive things about WatchGuard to other people in the industry, people I talk to or know. I'm a promoter of WatchGuard, to be honest. I haven't seen anything I like better, but I haven't had a lot of experience with other devices. I've said good things to people on a regular basis, especially about WatchGuard's education, the emails and videos and other stuff they put out to try and help people, even when it's not related to WatchGuard products.

I use it as my firewall. 

We are using it to filter our email.

It roadblocks most everything, as far as viruses and stuff like that, from getting into my network and does a good job of that.

If there is any conflict, the reporting feature will kick out all types of information, which is great.

The most valuable feature is if I need to control spam. I can control everything with it, anything coming in or out of my network. The controllability is phenomenal.

You can control how you want things to go in and out of it. So, it is great for that.

The software in it could be a bit more friendly for an amateur user. I look at it and don't understand what half the stuff is. Looking at the interface, it is all mumbo-jumbo to me. It's not a simple interface. You have to be an IT guy to understand it. It is not for your average person to use, then walk away from it. It is much more entailed. It could be a bit more user-friendly, but my IT guy knows what he's doing with it. I just let him do most everything.

They need to make it so you have a step-by-step guide which goes through and sets it all up for you. However, they don't have that. You have to know what you're doing with it.

It seems to be stable.

There are always updates for it. So, they are always improving it. We are always putting updates into it all the time. They do a good job of trying to keep up on everything.

I just have a consultant who comes in every so often to do deployment and maintenance.

I haven't seen any restrictions as far as the scalability is concerned, so it seems to be just fine.

All of our users are just office workers. 

Our IT guy talks highly of the technical support, saying that they are pretty knowledgeable. He never complains about them. 

I've had WatchGuard ever since I put my network together. All I've used is WatchGuard.

They were discontinuing support for the last one that I had. Therefore, I had to upgrade to the M200.

The initial setup is complicated. Unless you know what you're doing with it, you can make mistakes, which are really difficult to recoup from. You have to know what you are doing with it. Otherwise, you'll screw it all up.

It only took our IT guy probably an hour to set it all up, but he knows what he's doing with it. He works with them everyday.

I just used an integrator for the deployment, who was good. I have worked with him for years.

There is an additional cost for support on top of licensing. When I bought my new unit, I received additional time added to my support. 

I just went by what my IT guy recommended, so I didn't really evaluate any others because he's very knowledgeable on all of these type of things. I just went off of his recommendation.

The functionality of the unit is great. However, you have to be pretty knowledgeable on how to work with its interface.

I don't any plans to increase usage. The product is always on and always being used.

We really don't use the firewall too much, we use it more as a VPN. We've got several different networks that we're joining through WatchGuard.

It has made firewall configuration really simple. It doesn't take years of training or certificates to go in and manage it. That's a big deal. We set up our firewall, operating as a VPN. It's bringing several networks together and it made that process easy.

In terms of my job, it's taken so little of my attention. I have worked with Cisco firewalls and they were complex. WatchGuard is easily understood and managed. It's easy to watch traffic go through the network, to look for ports that are closed or open, and to see what's actually moving through the network and what's not. It has made it easy to understand network traffic.

The learning curve is very small in comparison to the Cisco firewall. Within two hours, I was managing WatchGuard, whereas with Cisco it might have taken a month to accomplish that same level of proficiency. As far as the control of traffic is concerned, I spend one or two hours a week on WatchGuard, as compared to about eight hours with the Cisco firewall. It has freed up my time to do other things.

What I like most is the analytical side. It's pretty simple to understand when you want to do any diagnostics on your network. If you want to go in and see what packages are having trouble getting through, what's being held, stalled, etc., it's very easy to use in that way.

In terms of the usability overall, it's pretty simple but, at the same time, it's pretty full-featured in terms of what it can do. We only use part of it, only because that's where we're at right now. But for a small network, for a small organization, especially, it's a complete solution to your firewall needs. It's relatively simple for me to get into and to work with when I need to; if I need to set up an ARP table or to create different reports. For a smaller network with lesser-trained IT people - if they're lucky, they've got one IT guy trying to do it all - it's an excellent size. Whether you've got a few machines or several hundred, it's pretty simple.

One of the things that is always valuable is workshops. It's really hard to get away and do webinars, but what I would like is a selection of webinars. I see WatchGuard comes forward with a webinar where they're going to introduce this or that. I'd like to see a lot more of those and a lot shorter.

On lynda.com I can just point to a video to show me something I need to know how to do; for example, how to merge contacts in Outlook. But it is a ten-minute video. I would like to see more of that kind of learning. I'm sure WatchGuard has got all these videos, has got the webinars and the training sessions. But when I need to know something, I need to be able to get to it quickly. I want an indexed learning system very close to what lynda.com might use. I also want to be able to put questions forward either in a "frequently-asked-questions" forum or by sending them up to the support team for quick reply. 

I want to be able to go to a portal and put in my problem and have WatchGuard bounce back to me with, "Well, this is how we can do it," or "We don't have a solution for that." And then I can go to other vendors to look for a solution.

The more targeted learning system I can have, the better. If I have to schedule a webinar that might take 30 minutes, there's a good chance I'll miss it. I sign up for webinars and it happens that I'm not available because I've got other fires going. The learning has to be there almost at my whim: "I've got a fire burning, I've got to figure out how to put it out. I need a ten-minute video to show me." Those learning sessions have to be available and easily found, when I need them. I have so little control over my schedule on a daily basis, and I'm sure I'm like many others.

One other shortcoming is that there is no backup for it. We really haven't figured out how we might solve that problem. We may want to put a duplicate in. With Cisco, it's not uncommon to have dual firewalls with something our size. That way, if one were to fail, we've always got the other. With WatchGuard, we just have the one box. If that were to fail, we'd probably be really hurting.

I haven't had to look at it in nine months. It just works pretty painlessly. It's very stable. It's kind of invisible.

We haven't hit a limit. We have the wireless running through it, a camera system running through it. There are 50 workstations running through it, as well as servers. I don't have any problems with it whatsoever. 

Tech support is everything for any product. WatchGuard's technical support is up there at eight or nine out of ten. That's really what you're looking for in a product; more than the product itself, it's that support. If it's not there, you can just frustrate yourself to death on solutions. WatchGuard is support is easily available and know what they are talking about.

We were looking for a solution. The engineer that I had knew of WatchGuard and thought it was probably a good idea, and that was the whole strategy. He had worked with it before and he was the lead engineer when we implemented it. He was right about WatchGuard, it is a good product.

We were using Ciscos. They were aged and out of date. They were pretty well done. Our options were to get new Ciscos and get them configured. Of course the deployment and hardware were expensive. And the maintenance or the management, in the long run, was much more expensive.

With the WatchGuard, the initial hardware was less expensive. And the implementation, because it didn't require as much training, was much less expensive. And the management is much less. When I say "much less," I'm talking about 25 percent of the cost of what the similar Cisco would be.

I remember it being somewhat complicated. There were some complications we ran into; it didn't seem to be quite as easy as what we'd hoped. We did have really good support though, from WatchGuard, on the other end, assisting with the setup. That made all the difference in the world. That made it pretty painless. That was the key. 

When you're configuring a new piece of hardware, there's always some little switch that you miss or that just doesn't make sense. When you've got that support on the other end they know exactly where to go... WatchGuard had that.

At first, we were running into some issues configuring it to meet our needs. It was throwing us for a loop for a while. The issue was setting up the correct rules. But from the time we got that done, it just sits there and runs. We've had it 15 months and I haven't seen it in nine months. We got it configured and set up, and it just operates. 

We had it running on the first day, literally within hours. We had a lot of configuration to be done over the next six months, twists here and there. But as far as actually being able to set it up and have a firewall in place, that was done within two or three hours.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. It was pretty much, "Get the license and you're good to go for the year."

We looked at Cisco in addition to WatchGuard. We didn't look at anything else.

I wouldn't hesitate to implement this solution. Particularly if you're down to an IT staff of one, this is a really good solution. If you're that small and your IT staff is very limited, then you're probably lacking the onsite expertise to move to a more expensive solution anyway. I would strongly recommend it.

We've got three people who sign in to WatchGuard, me and two others. Beyond that, everybody else is just an end-user. I'm the only full-time IT person we have on staff. We do have a vendor that we use for a lot of our engineering solutions and design. They spend about 12 hours a week on our network.

As for increasing our usage of it, I don't know what all its capabilities are. I deal with problems all the time and I have to come up with solutions for them. I don't foresee any expanded use of WatchGuard. However, it may be that it can solve some of my problems much more simply than some of the other solutions I'm thinking about. But I don't really know how it could at this point, so I'm not seeing us using more of it than we are now.

I would give WatchGuard a ten out of ten. It's simple, easily managed, and it has good tech support compared to other products out there. Because it is a full-functioning firewall, it does everything with full support. You're not buying a cheaper quality of firewall at all. It's full quality, fully functional and has good support.

Our primary use case is VPN connectivity between 50 locations and our headquarters.

It saves us a lot of money over MPLS connections, about $125,000 per year.

WatchGuard provides us with one of our layers of security. The HTTPS proxy is where a lot of things get trapped.

The most valuable are the VPN and proxy features. We have all the sites we have to connect and that's how we do it.

I've been using it for so long so I'm pretty used to it. But I think it's fairly simple to use and understand. It helps if you're an IT expert. There isn't much of a learning curve if someone has an understanding of connectivity and firewalling. If they don't, there is certainly a learning curve.

The throughput is excellent. It's only limited to our bandwidth. We haven't had any trouble with throughput. The throughput of the firewall, in all cases, seems to be better than the bandwidth available. It's not the bottleneck.

I don't use the reporting features a whole lot, but Dimension is pretty good.

It's very hard to get information from their website, for exactly what I need to do. Sometimes I end up having to open a lot of support tickets. It's either too detailed or not. I never have good luck with their online tools. It's a navigational issue which makes it hard to find what I'm looking for and it's just so broad.

In addition, I have had a ticket in for an awful long time regarding a bug that they should address. If you're using a firewall as a DHCP server, it doesn't keep a good record of the leases. I opened a ticket on this about two years ago, and every couple of months I get an email back that it's still under engineering review.

They're very stable. I've had one firewall fail at 50 locations in the last ten years.

Scalability for me would mean, as we add more branch locations, the firewall here can support all of those VPN connections, and I'm not even scratching the service of what it can hit. It's very scalable.

Tech support has been good. It's gotten a lot better the past few years; it's very much improved. Twelve years ago it was the worst. Now, it's very good. They get back to me in a day if it's nothing critical. And I don't ever really have to escalate. They're pretty resourceful and understand their product.

Previously, I built a Linux box.

The initial setup is very straightforward. I've done it so many times that I could do it in my sleep. It's pretty simple to run through the GUI and get a quick setup. It's like if you asked me, is it hard to drive a car? I've been driving a car so long I don't know any other options. It takes me maybe an hour to set one up and get it ready to send out. At that point, it's fully configured. It's just plug-and-play when it gets to the location.

I, or one of my IT guys, will often have to be onsite. We'll send one out to a branch, then we'll have to walk the warehouse manager through how to plug things in. Deploying it to distributed locations consists of plugging it into the modem and plugging it into the network, assuming I programmed it correctly.

Deploying it requires just one person. We have three people in the IT group maintaining the entire network, but it's mostly me. It takes me about five hours a week.

ROI is very abstract for a security tool. As far as being able to create VPN tunnels versus having it managed by another vendor, as I said, it saves us about $125,000 a year, maybe a little more. Even comparing it so an SDYN solution from an outside vendor, it's a lot less expensive.

We only license our corporate one and the one we have at our DR site, we don't worry about the branches. It doesn't pay for us to license the ones at the branches. What they charge for what they call basic maintenance is extremely high for those little fireboxes. So we don't bother with them.

They're good machines. They're fairly easy to configure and they're stable.

We mostly use the M400 at corporate and at our branch offices we use T35s, T30s, and XTM25s. In terms of additional usage, I'm looking at the management console and, possibly, the drag-and-drop VPNs.

I would rate it at nine out of ten. The documentation makes it a little hard to find what I need sometimes.

We use them as our firewall in every location. It's extensively used and our locations for it are ever-expanding. Right now, we have 14 locations with them. We have everything from the M300 to the T50-W to the T30-W.

Like any other firewall, if it goes down, it's going to cause problems but these don't go down.

If I had to spend half my day fighting the stuff that it's keeping out, in that sense, it's increasing productivity. But if I was having to do that, I would find something else.

There are a lot of features I really like.

One of them is that the interface is more intuitive for us. And the success rate has been very good for us. It's easier to use than a SonicWall. There's a learning curve with every firewall, but this one is a lot more intuitive than some of the other ones I've used.

We've been very happy with the throughput and the performance the solution provides.

The Dimension control, the one-spot reporting and control, has been nice. It's been easy to go in and make sure people are doing what they're supposed to be doing and that only the right stuff is getting in.

It provides us with layered security.

It's got a global map where you can block IP based on which country it's coming from. I haven't seen that on anything else.

They work. We don't have to boot them. 

The only time they get booted is if there is a major, extended loss of power. Otherwise, they just stay up and running. The location I'm at has been up for 90 days and the only reason it went down 90 days ago was that we had about a 12-hour power outage. It got our batteries. It got everything. But like I said, they're reliable.

There is scalability because they have different models to choose from, as long as you buy right.

We have 500 employees and about 150 users. I'm sure we have plans to increase usage. In terms of how extensively it is being used, it's filtering every piece of internet traffic we have.

I haven't had to use their technical support in about seven years.

When it comes to installing a new box, it's pretty simple. We have a config we copy over to it and then we just customize that config with the IP addressing that we need at that location. It doesn't get much easier than that. It takes less than an hour and takes one person to deploy it.

We used a third-party integrator when we did our mass upgrade in 2017. At that time, all of our other ones had become end-of-life. They were Firebox Edges. We bought the boxes, dumped the configs on them, between us and the third-party, and either I or the third-party would deliver and install. Onsite downtime was as little as ten minutes.

Deploying it to distributed locations was super-simple.

We haven't had anything get through it. It's hard to say what your return on investment is when you're saving problems. You can't quantify how many possible threats you're saving in a day.

We bought ours bundled with two or three years at the time we bought them. I haven't seen the pricing since 2017, but it was competitive. SonicWall, Barracuda, and WatchGuard were all about the same price when we did our last pricing.

We investigated SonicWall back in about 2016 and decided to stay with WatchGuard because we felt the interface was a lot better. It's also easier to manage, easier to keep an eye on. We really despised the SonicWall. The support for it was awful. Dell already had it and it was bad. I had experience with SonicWall in the past, before it was a Dell company. The SonicWalls were pretty good then.

We looked into Barracuda. We didn't actually test it. We used some other Barracuda stuff, but we didn't actually even test their firewall. I don't remember why we didn't go with them. That was a decision made three years ago. We use their backup appliance and couldn't be happier with it, so it wasn't a support issue or a reputation issue. I don't know if there was a little difference in pricing which was the reason that we didn't try it.

We investigated the other one, we actually put the test box in, and Firebox was far superior to what we tested.

Give Firebox a good, strong look. Give it a test run and I'm sure you'll be happy with it. We've always had it. Our opinion of it is that it flat-out works and we're very satisfied with it.

I'm sure there are better ones out there for somebody who has more time to manage it. But if you're looking for something so that you don't need a dedicated staff to manage it, I'd say this is a pretty good one. I give it a nine out of ten.

Production business use at multiple interconnected locations.

It is one of the layers of our security and it definitely does protect us from many attack vectors. Between the antivirus scanning, the blocking, and DNSWatch, it is protecting us from a number of attack vectors. It is also provides useful diagnostic tools for identifying and troubleshooting issues. A recent example was when a few LOB network devices were having issues which was affecting operations. ZazaThe ability to search the realtime and historical logs helped me to navigate, zone in, and identify the ultimate issue. It ended up not being the firewall, but fast access to the logs helped me determine and prove that to be the case.

Because of the way it's organized and the user-friendliness of the device, it does make my job managing the firewall profiles and security a lot easier. There's nothing you have to do through the command line. Being able to definitively know what the configuration is, visually, being able to edit it offline without affecting production have all been big time-savers for me. When I had to do two firewalls which had similar configurations it saved me at least 20 hours of setup work. Templates allowed me to create and define a bunch of objects once and use them in both places.

Overall, per month, Firebox will save me four to five hours, depending on if there's something I have to investigate.

The Application Control and web blocker have been very valuable because they let me control the outgoing traffic of my users and keep them off of both productivity wasters and sources of vulnerabilities in my environment. 

I like the High Availability feature because it allows a firewall to fail while keeping the environment up and running.

In terms of its usability, it's very straightforward to use, once you understand the way they look at a firewall and the design choices they made.

The throughput the solution provides is excellent. I have not had any performance-related issues with any of the fireboxes I've used.

I like their management features a lot. Their System Manager server as well the System Manager software make managing them, and tracking changes, very easy and complete. In terms of the reporting, I am just starting to look at the reports in Dimension and they look pretty well-organized and useful.

The product could have some more predefined service protocols in the list, which don't have to manually be defined. But that's very low hanging fruit.

The documentation for the System Manager/Dimension configuration, could be a little bit clearer. The use case where you have multiple sites with multiple firewalls, and one site that has the System Manager server and the Dimension server, wasn't really well defined. It took me a little bit of digging to get that to actually work.

It's pretty rock-solid. I've never had to reboot one because it was acting in an unstable manner and have some that I ran through their entire usable lives without issue.

The scalability is good, assuming you buy the right model. They make it easy to trade up to a bigger model without having a big, financial impact, giving you a discount to trade up. 

The times I've used technical support it was excellent.

I moved from FortiGate. The reasons i switched include price - WatchGuard is a lot more cost-effective than FortiGate - and complexity. FortiGate is very complicated, had little documentation which relied heavily on cookbooks, and a lot of command-line required to get some common things to work. WatchGuard is very well-documented and everything fits within their configuration. Nothing that I've encountered has to be done through the command line. And when your subscription expires on the WatchGuard, it will still pass traffic, if you configure it to. FortiGate will only allow one connection out. 

The initial set up was very straightforward. You take it out of the box, you plug it in, you download the software, and it starts working. That's what I consider to be the initial set up, and that was very easy and very fast.

The deployment took me a total of about 40 hours for two sites, two firewalls, and with an incredibly complicated configuration. The complexity was a product of the environment, not the firewall.

I utilized the template feature to make everything that could be the same, the same across both sites, which are connected locations.

In-house.

They are well priced for the market and offer discounts for competitor trades and model upgrades which are definitely worth taking advantage of.

FortiGate and WatchGuard were the only two I've evaluated recently.

I would definitely recommend using WatchGuard.

I would also recommend taking one of the courses that goes through all the features of the device and the way it is organized. Every firewall vendor looks at things differently. If you don't understand the way WatchGuard is structured, you may make a strategic mistake in setting it up and you'll have to tear some of it down and redo which is true of any firewall. Leanr and use the tools Watchguard  provides.

I used to do everything in WatchGuard through their Web UI but I now use the System Manager software because it is very valuable. It provides a lot of features that I had not realized I was missing. The System Manager Server is able to store previous versions of the configuration, and to force people to enter comments regarding what they changed when they save one. Being able to compare the configurations side-by-side, and have it tell you the differences are great tools that you should know about if you're going to start implementing a WatchGuard.

Our primary use case is for firewalls.

We were using Websense before, for website filtering, and we had to configure the device to block and monitor. Then we would go to Cisco to configure the firewall ports and then we used antivirus software to protect that the gateway from viruses. So we were using three or four different security products. WatchGuard integrated into everything in one place, so it's much easier to configure.

It has simplified my job. Before WatchGuard, we needed one person inside and two people outside to set up our network. Now I can do it by myself.

The solution has saved us 30 minutes to an hour every day. In terms of productivity, before WatchGuard we had given up checking the logs because there was so much information. But now, with its graphical interface, it's much easier to get the information that I need: the violations and sever errors are easier to pull out.

The most valuable feature is the GUI, especially the real-time bandwidth usage report. Also, its integration with WiFi access points is nice.

The product's usability is very good. We were using Cisco products before, and that was terrible. The difference is in integration. With Cisco we had to go into the command line to configure devices. With WatchGuard we can do everything from the GUI, so it's much easier to set up and to make sure everything is working the way we want.

The throughput of the solution is good. It's also very good at reporting. I can see things graphically so I don't have to read through all the log text files.

The solution provides our business with layered security. In terms of the attack vectors it secures, we have a firewall set up and it gives me reports. It also has an integrated web filtering solution. I can set up a website filter and it's all filtered in one place. I don't have to go to another solution.

I don't know if it's just my version, but the WiFi access point integration has just started. It's getting better but if there were more reporting of the devices that are connected to WiFi access points that would be great. Right now I can see the MAC address and bandwidth usage for each device but that's about it. If I could see which sites the devices are visiting and what kind of traffic is generated from each device, that would be great.

We bought Firebox four or five years ago, and with the first version I had to reboot it every two or three months for no apparent reason. We upgraded last year to the M370 and it's been running, but it is rebooting from time to time. I don't know why.

Since everything is integrated, when there is really high user traffic, especially to the different locations, including email and everything coming in at one time, I see very high CPUs. It may not be as scalable as having three or four different devices running, one for each task.

The bandwidth is good but we only have a 15 meg fibre to this location and I see high CPU usage, so I wonder how far it can go up. It's working well for us but if you are trying to go to 200 or 300 meg of bandwidth you may need to get a bigger WatchGuard.

We don't have any plans to increase usage in the future. It has a hotspot client access which we're somewhat interested in, but we don't have many guests coming into our offices. That's the one area where we might spend some time.

Technical support is really good. That's one of the best parts of this product. With Cisco, you have to transfer all over the place, but with WatchGuard there's a ticket system. When you open up a ticket, they are really responsive.

Their response time is within a few hours. If you just log a ticket through the website, you get a response back within one to two hours. But if you call up, they respond really fast. And it's a real tech guy responding back. You go through all your details and you get answers right away.

At times I have made an additional feature request and even I have forgotten that I requested it, but they keep following up. I have to say, "It's okay now, forget it."

We were using Cisco Professional Services whenever we had to tweak our IP forms or QoS and those advanced types of changes. The outside consultants were costing us money. With WatchGuard we can do the setup by ourselves. We tried it and found we could do it.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The graphic interface gives you bandwidth control, traffic control, and a graphics screen, unlike the Cisco products where you have to go into the command line. There, you are typing commands but it's really hard to tell if it's working or not. With WatchGuard, it gives you the response right back and you see results right away. So, it's much easier to configure.

Our deployment took about three days. To get it up and running it took about one hour. The rest of the time was to tweak our firewalls, open up this port, open up that site.

Regarding our implementation strategy, we have ten remote locations. We started with one branch as a test bed, set up a template there, and applied it to the corporate site here. When we applied it to the corporate site it took a little while, about three days. But once the corporate template was done, the other sites were quick. We set up the device, and it shipped it out and, in ten to 15 minutes, it was up and running.

We purchased the solution from a local distributor, Jensen IT, and they had a support line. We called up two or three times. Our experience with them was very reasonable.

From a pure cost standpoint, we cut our fees in half by moving to WatchGuard. And in terms of time, we are spending one-third or even one-fifth of the time we were spending on Cisco devices. Those are substantial savings.

The price is so small that I don't pay attention to it anymore. I think we pay a few thousand dollars for two to three years, so about $100 per month. That's for all of our users.

There is an additional cost if we want to go with a deeper licensing model, but we just pay for antivirus, IPS, and main product support.

At the time we made the switch to WatchGuard we were also using two or three different solutions to manage security and our internet connection. We were using Symantec Gateway for antivirus protection, Websense for web filtering, Symantec IPS reporting, and Cisco.

The integration of all of those with our system was cumbersome and there were maintenance fees and license fees being paid to four or five companies. All licensing terms were different and it was really cumbersome to manage. With WatchGuard, everything is really in one place.

However, for one of our new locations we started using Meraki, which has cloud capabilities so I can remotely manage the setup of the firewall for remote offices. For ease-of-setup, Meraki is a little bit easier. If you want an easy solution in terms of setup, Meraki might be a better solution. But there is a lack of depth of setup on the Meraki, while WatchGuard is a real firewall solution. In the new office, we only have a five people, so the WatchGuard features may be a little bit too much that size of office.

Firebox has a very small model for personal use, a home-use product, but we did not test it out. That might be a good fit, but the value for a very small office may be a little bit of overkill.

If you have a small IT staff and want an easy-to-set-up solution, I would one hundred percent recommend WatchGuard. If you have a very serious, big IT department and a big business, you might want to test out the throughput and the stability.

In each of our ten remote offices, we have about ten to 15 people using it. At our corporate office we have 70 to 80 people. We require two people for deployment and one person for maintenance of the solution, including me, the IT manager and, our systems administrator.

I would rate the solution at nine out of the. It's just missing that stability point.