WatchGuard Firebox Reviews

We primarily use the solution to secure our networks in branch via SSL and VPN. We also use it for our web pages hosted on our servers. This product handled everything UTM.

The solution has benefitted us by offering a secure connection. We don't spend as much time analyzing when traffic goes somewhere. We have clearance capabilities. We see what happens in our network.

The hardware is quite good.

The solution is fast. When we commit and change items in Firebox. It just works and it is simple. When you drop a connection, it gets dropped in a second. The speed is important to us.

It has everything we need in terms of functionality.

The solution is scalable.

It is stable and reliable. 

Pricing is reasonable. 

The UI and web view aren't nice. The fonts are too small, for example. 

I've been using the solution for three years. 

It is very stable. I haven't seen any issues with it. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable. I'd rate it nine out of ten in terms of stability.

The solution can scale quite well. If a company needs to expand, it can. I'd rate the ability to scale at an eight or a nine out of ten. It's easy.

I've never directly reached out to technical support.

When we need to make something really good, we need to take the time to ensure that's the case. However, the configurations are simple.

We had a business help us implement the solution. 

So far, the solution has been worth the cost.

The product isn't necessarily expensive to acquire. The pricing is reasonable. 

There are no extra costs or hidden fees. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. We've been pleased with the product overall. 

We have four locations and at every one of them we use WatchGuard. We use them as firewalls and for UTM. They provide protection in terms of detection and prevention. And we also use them for site-to-site VPN, as well as for direct connect, VPN to AWS, and to AWS using VLAN tagging.

One of the main ways it has helped is that we use site-to-site VPN a lot, as well as remote access ACLs and client-to-VPN. Prior to WatchGuard, for example, we used to use Remote Desktop, which is not very secure, or RD Web, which is also not very secure. We installed the client VPN on everyone's remote computer and they can access our local area network. That is much better than using the other solutions. It's an improvement for the user and it's less risky for us. It gives us peace of mind that we're using the proper channels to access our network.

It's hard to pick one feature over another. But if I had to pick one, the UTM would be the most valuable because of the notification. I get notified via email if there is any type of threat detection or alert, telling me something is wrong.

For me personally, because I'm Cisco-Certified, it was very easy to take this over. I think it's a lot easier to work with because it's a GUI and not a CLI. I cannot speak for other users or other administrators, but it's pretty simple.

Based on our needs, the throughput is pretty solid. We haven't had any issues as far as the throughput is concerned. This particular box maxes out at 2 GBs and we only have 1 GB so we haven't had any latency.

I manage it using the System Manager, based on the firewall access control that I have. I've been able to manage it and use it without any problems.

Websense is an application that monitors and filters internet traffic. Websense was derived from WatchGuard. But when you go to WatchGuard to actually implement that particular feature, you have to use some type of additional feature and you have to pay for it, unfortunately. I think it should be free or free in the WatchGuard box itself, as an option. It would be nice if they didn't charge us for that.

And if they won't offer it for free, they should offer something better. It definitely needs a big improvement because it's very unfriendly. It's called Dimension Basic and there is a reason they call it basic, because it gives you very basic information. Let's say you want to track someone's internet activity or where they've been going. Websense gives you detailed information as far as the source. But this one only gives you very basic information and, on top of that, it's a free version for only a few months and then you have to pay for it. So not only is the version very basic but you still have to pay for it. That, in my opinion, has room for improvement.

Everything else that we have, the live security services and network discovery and all the spam blocking, threat protection, and the web blocker, is included.

We've been using Firebox for as long as I can remember. I inherited this position close to 13 years ago and they'd been using it before that.

For the most part, everything seems to be working without any issues. That's why we've had it for this long, close to 17 years for the company and, under me, for 13 years. There are more pros than cons.

We haven't had any issues. I always buy an additional box as a Hot Standby. I have never had to use it, and thank God for that. So it's been very stable. We keep them for a maximum of three to four years and then we upgrade to a newer one. For the time that we keep the box active, we don't have any issues.

In terms of scalability, as far other features go, we're stuck with what we have on the physical appliance. For example, we had one that was set to 300 MBs for throughput and when we wanted to upgrade, we couldn't obviously use that same box. It wasn't really scalable. So we had to upgrade to a newer version.

We have four locations and approximately 400 users. We don't have any firm plans to increase usage. The owner of our company just acquired another company and that may make a difference. WatchGuard is the main component that we use. The subscription for all four of the WatchGuards that we currently have ends in 180 days. We're just going to upgrade to the newer version, if it's available. 

There was an incident, back in the day, where I called for support and the guy sort of brushed me off. It was very uncomfortable but it could have been an isolated incident. I don't want to say that all the support engineers are the same. But this particular guy was either drunk or rude.

Other than that, it's been very smooth sailing for us, as far as support goes.

We have always been using Cisco. They decided that WatchGuard would be beneficial to keep because it's GUI and it's a lot easier to work with than other products, especially for junior admins.

I set it up all the time and it's very straightforward. It's very easy to set up and very easy to migrate over to a newer version. It's really simple. I've only done a new deployment once. 

For upgrades, you save the configuration and you upload it to a new file, or you just open a new file and browse to the configuration file that you saved. It usually takes 10 minutes at the most.

But the first deployment, because it was obviously more involved, took a few hours. Setup included the site-to-site VPN, the client VPN, the actual interfaces, the static NATs, a lot of the firewall policy, the internet certificates, and the policy routing; the basic components of any router.

Deploying WatchGuard to distributed locations is mainly the same. Obviously, there are differences in the IP addressing and the network addresses. And you have to take care of the VPN connection between the two, to be able to communicate using the site-to-site VPN. There is also web blocking. We have certain policies for denying access to certain sites or certain applications. We don't allow, for example, weapons or sex or any of those kinds of solicitation sites. We then set the external and internal interfaces and then do the routing. In the some of those locations we use the WatchGuard as a DHCP server, so we set that up as well. The rest is all pre-configured.

We have had two-year deals in the past, but recently we decided to go with annual. The cost was somewhere in the vicinity of $2,000 to $3,000 for each one, depending on if they had a special at that time or if they were doing an in-place upgrade or with the same router.

They figured if they were going to get something different then it would have to be something very user-friendly for the administrators, because I'm the only one who is certified to work on Cisco. We evaluated the Barracuda NextGen Firewall. We also looked into Juniper and the Meraki firewall, because all our switches are Meraki switches. 

But we decided to stay with the WatchGuard. The prices were a little bit better than Meraki and, since everything was pre-configured, to upgrade to a newer WatchGuard all we had to do was just save the config file and upload it to the new one, and that was the end of that.

Educate yourself. Read documentation and watch videos online. Since the administrators are going to use it, they should educate themselves on WatchGuard. Keep a cheap, old box for training. I train my administrators on an older box and I give them a network to train on.

We have been attacked with ransomware in the past, and it was kind of disappointing because, when I talked to Cisco support they said that they recommended purchasing end-point protection with a ransomware interceptor, so we ended up getting Sophos. So alongside the WatchGuard, we have Sophos' ransomware interceptor and end-point protection. We use them, on top of the WatchGuard, as a secondary line of defense.

It has been smooth sailing as far as the product itself is concerned. That's why we keep renewing it. We either renew it or we upgrade to the newest version if they have a special. We also use it for Hot Standby. It's been good.

It is a firewall. I have two M400s. They act as security for the Internet, like a border between us and the Internet.

We allow more outside vendors to be able to come in, then I could protect them. This is a way that I could leverage the solution which has improved business. It has made vendors coming from the outside able to get to resources that we can provide them without allowing them onto our production network.

We have the logging working along with the System Manager overview. This all seems very good to use and straightforward. It is where I look when I start since it gives me that sort of a single pane of glass for both firewalls.

It gives me Layer 3 and Layer 4 security. I don't know if it gives me the full Layer 7 security, which some other firewalls do. It might in new revisions of it. However, for what I need, it meets the sweet spot.

Having the VPN access helps productivity in the sense that people can get to resources anywhere.

• HostWatch is a nice feature.
• Logging
• The central management piece of the system
• The overview manager is good to have.
• The GUI is somewhat easy to use.

These features provide visibility on the network. When there is trouble, I like to see why I might be having trouble at the gateway level.

HostWatch makes it so I can see, in real-time, activity in the event that there is something weird happening on the network. This simplifies my job.

The product's usability is good. It is straightforward and simple. One of the benefits is that it is easy to navigate and intuitive.

Sometimes, the writing rules are a little confusing in how am I doing them.

I had some trouble with the previous product version (XTM) at the end. When the product aged a bit, there were no redundant power supplies. For what we're doing, it would've been nice to have something to fall back on instead rebuilding and taking it from an old configuration because the older version did die. We were able to take from an older configuration, build a new one quickly, and get it up and running, which didn't take long, but there was some pain around it.

With the previous version (XTM), I started seeing some hiccups.

With this new version (M400), it has been in place for about a year and been running just fine. I haven't had to reboot it. I don't think I've had an issue at all with it.

I manage the solution as the network administrator.

I am not sure what I can scale up to. It meets our needs, though. We're not a growing company. We are sort of a static company in terms of growth. As a static company, we are not looking to increase our usage.

We have around 200 users, who are tradesmen, toll collectors, administrators, accountants, and auditors.

I haven't used WatchGuard's technical support because it is an easy product to use.

We switched from WatchGuard's previous model due to age of hardware. We went from something that was seven or eight years old to something from the last year or two.

The initial setup was straightforward. We had been previously using WatchGuard and moved from an XTM to an M400. So, this is our second-generation of firewall with them, and I didn't have any problems.

The deployment took about a day. I upgraded the hardware, making sure that everything migrated over correctly. That was the goal. I had one rule that I dropped, but that's about it.

We have multiple networks with Internet points of presence where we have multiple firewalls. These are not at the distribution layer. The core layer is more where our firewall is.

For the price point, what we do with it, and the time that the last one lived for on our network, we have gotten our money's worth from it. I'm satisfied with the product for the most part.

We did consider other vendors. I don't think there's a need for us to switch right now. In the future, there might be. However, we're pretty happy right now with what we have.

We also looked at Palo Alto, Cisco, and Juniper NetScreen. We looked at Juniper because we have a lot of Juniper switching infrastructure. WatchGuard's price point worked, which is the reason why we stayed with WatchGuard.

Leverage the website. They have a good knowledge base out there. If this was a green deployment, make sure that you understand how the policies work for VPN and matting.

The throughput is adequate. It certainly handles what I pumped through it, which is about 150MB. I don't know how we would do on a big gigabit network, but for what I do, it works. I haven't seen any slow downs in throughput.

I am not using the Cloud Visibility feature.

I use it for protecting my network and for routing. Also, if my network connection goes down with CenturyLink, it automatically switches over to my Verizon cellular.

It protects me against malicious websites, as well as malicious downloads, as a perimeter anti-virus. I've also seen it blocking a lot of pings and different probes. 

A file wasn't opening on one of our mobile devices, so the owner said, "Hey, open it on your computer," and WatchGuard stopped it. I didn't have to try to remove a virus from my accountant's computer because WatchGuard stopped it. 

It has also saved me time by not having to rebuild because of damage to the network due to nefarious situations. Since I installed WatchGuard, it has probably saved me 20 hours a year thanks to increased uptime as well as not having any issues with viruses on computers. It's protecting my network and I don't have to deal with downtime.

It has increased productivity in security management.

I've also had very good uptake time. I would have to reboot my previous routers once a month or so or try to figure out what was wrong with them. With WatchGuard I've had zero problems. If I ever have an issue with connecting to the internet, it's always due to my internet provider.

As the person who manages IT for the business, it saves me thousands of dollars.

• Safety
• Uptime

The solution's reporting and management features are good.

I would like to see more simplified management of the firewall. It's something that I've had to bring in outside support for - for setting up the firewall - because I don't fully understand it yet. I've been learning it. Some of that is my fault, but it's a complicated system to use. I don't know if it can be simplified much, because of the nature of what it's doing. But it's very complicated.

It's very stable. I haven't ever had a product that is this stable.

It appears to be scalable. Scalability doesn't apply to me very much. I did have to buy a new router since the last one wasn't powerful enough. But it was not too bad because I was able to upload all my previous settings to this new one. It handles our entire network, but I don't have any plans on increasing usage.

We have 15 employees and everyone uses it for some sort of connection, whether it be for their phones to connect to our server for our time-tracking system, or for our office computers. I'm the only person who takes care of its maintenance.

I would rate their technical support very highly. They are very knowledgeable.

I used Ubiquity. I switched because it was not stable and it would not provide a lot of the services that I needed.

It was complicated, but it's hard to say that it's the fault of the device itself, and not the complexity of what I was doing. It's managing my internet connection. I eliminated my internet provider's modem from my network. It's doing all of the routing and the work of the modem for my fibre internet connection. So it was complicated to set that up with my internet provider, but I don't know if that's due to the appliance itself.

The deployment took less than a day. It's hard to say exactly how long it took because I do woodworking as well as maintaining our network. It's hard for me to give it my full attention but I would say it took about four hours.

I purchased it through Last Mile Gear, a reseller. One of their techs assisted me in installing it. He was pretty helpful. I also called WatchGuard's helpline and they were very helpful.

The service seemed fairly expensive, but when I saw it stopped a malicious file and saved our computer from having to be rebuilt, I upped it to their Security Suite. It definitely showed itself to be useful, and I'm glad that I have it.

It's prevented network intrusions, which is invaluable. Having 100 percent uptime so far has made it a great value.

The cost three years ago was about $800. There were no additional costs beyond the initial purchase.

The reseller recommended WatchGuard, so that's what I went with.

If you can understand the way the firewall works, the logic of the firewall, it will serve you really well. It's a very stable, great product.

I started with a T10. I ended up needing a more powerful version, so I bought the T30 about two years ago. I've been very happy with it. The usability is difficult but it's a complicated system. It's a professional solution. I wouldn't recommend it to my friends for their homes, but for business, I think it's a fantastic solution.

I'm happy with the throughput on the T30. The T10 was definitely lacking. It was definitely slow.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. The way to make it a ten would be to make it easier to use for a novice.

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.

WatchGuard Firebox is our edge firewall.

Currently, we are using the M470 and we have used many models in the past.

The solution provides our business with layered security. An example would be the intrusion protection on anything that is internet-facing. We host our own mail server and I regularly see that WatchGuard has swatted away attempts to get in from bad actors. I have to have that open because people have to connect on their cell phones. Obviously they have to send and receive mail. So I sleep a lot better knowing that something is watching the few things that I do need to present to the internet. I feel much better having something protecting and monitoring all traffic that passes through.

We have an interesting environment. There is actually a completely separate computer domain, an entirely separate network that belongs to a regulatory body. We work at a casino and our gaming commission has to be able to get into some of our systems and monitor some of our activities. Obviously we don't want them to just plug directly into our network, so we have created a DMZ where they can come into our network via the WatchGuard. That way, I get to see all of their activity as well and monitor what they can get to. We give them access to what they need and nothing more.

The solution also simplifies aspects of my job by having automated reports generated weekly, for review. I like the fact that they get delivered and I get to see the actual metrics of what the box is doing. The reporting features reassure me that it is working.

In terms of saving time, I have used Cisco firewalls in the past and I would say that it is easier to construct policies with WatchGuard than it is in Cisco, particularly Cisco's ASDM (Adaptive Security Device Manager). It probably takes about half the time with WatchGuard. Usually we're just modifying something, adding or removing somebody from a web blocker category. It's very easy to maintain.

As a casino, we have one site and that's it. There are no mobile workers. We usually don't have any remote access and we don't need collaboration tools because we all work in the same building. But now that we're trying to get some people to not come in [due to the Corona virus situation] and we're running on a skeleton crew, we are able to maintain productivity by leveraging the native VPN clients and access provided by WatchGuard. We didn't have to buy anything. We had all the infrastructure ready to go and then I slapped a policy together last Tuesday and we've been using it ever since. It was very easy.

• One of the most valuable features is the Gateway AntiVirus. We scan all traffic as it's coming through.
• We also use spamBlocker to scrub spam.
• We use content filtering, which is critical in any corporate environment to make sure that people don't surf things they're not supposed to.
• WatchGuard has a very easy VPN and branch office VPN setup, so we use those pretty extensively too.

It's very easy to use.

And our internet bandwidth does not exceed its throughput, so it is probably still a little overbuilt. It's definitely not a bottleneck. There is no problem with throughput.

In terms of performance, WatchGuard has always worked well for us. We've gone through about six different models in the last nine years, not all at our primary site. We had a couple of satellite offices that were using smaller models. They have all worked very well. There was only one time that we had a performance issue and it turned out that it was due to a hardware replacement being required, and that was handled expeditiously.

Regarding the reporting, I was in the Dimension server earlier today. It's very powerful. I like it. And the management features are easy to use. I like the fact that I can open up the System Manager client or I can just do it through the web if I'm making a quick change.

WatchGuard could be a little more robust in reporting. I get requests a lot to figure out people's internet traffic. We want to know what people are doing when they are on the internet. There is still a little bit of fine-tuning that can be done to that process.

I took over the admin role here back in 2011, so I've been using it for close to 10 years.

It's very solid. We don't reboot it very often and we don't seem to need to.

We went from a single appliance to a high-availability cluster, just last year. Managing the cluster is just as easy as it was to manage one unit.

It is doing everything we've asked of it so far, but we do plan on increasing usage. There are a few features that came out last year or maybe a little bit before that, features that we want to start using, such as WatchGuard's DNS. That will make sure that we're not asking for any bad players. At the moment we're still using Google DNS. And we haven't rolled out the endpoint security that came with it, but we are going to start using that as well.

I've never had to use their technical support. I've only used their online help. I've been able to find everything I need in the forums and the Knowledge Base.

The initial setup is straightforward. The wizards walk you through it, and I have found an answer to anything that I've ever had a question about in the Knowledge Base online. I don't think I've ever had to call for support personally. The documentation is awesome.

As for setup time, I usually have traffic passing through it within an hour or two. 

I know what traffic I want to allow out and I always start with just the stuff that I need to. I always start with the most restrictive, as far as policies go. The first thing I do is get rid of all the Any-Any rules and then I start locking it down. I love the way that it integrates with Active Directory. I base my internet usage and my web blocker policies on Active Directory security groups, and I can have all of that stuff set up ahead of time before I ever get ready to roll out the appliance itself.

Back in the day, we used to have a warehouse. We used to have a uniform shop that was offsite and I was responsible for setting up the tunnels of those sites. We recently relocated some administrative offices for the tribe that owns the casino that I work for, and we decided when they were moving that we would upgrade the firewall that they had. We purchased a WatchGuard so that it would be manageable, because we were already familiar with it from using it at our site. We dropped it right into place and I had traffic passing through it within minutes. I was done with it, doing all the other rules, within a couple of hours. I was onsite for all of those. I've never preconfigured one and then sent it out into the wild.

We use Variable Path, out of San Francisco. Our rep is Jason Chang. Our experience with them was very good. I would recommend them.

It's hard to measure ROI. But I've never had to go in front of upper management and tell them that we were breached. That is probably the conversation I would least like to have with them.

Otherwise, regarding return on investment, having the infrastructure already here and having more capabilities than we're using right now allow me to react very quickly. As I said, I was able to get some people working from home last week. It literally took us a day from going from zero people with remote access to a core group of about 12 people having remote access.

Getting a WatchGuard for the first three years pays for the hardware. I think it's cheaper to keep doing hardware upgrades at every software renewal, rather than just pay for maintenance to keep a piece of hardware going. I usually tell people that it's really affordable as well, particularly compared to Cisco.

In addition to the standard cost, we usually get the Total Security Suite. We go top-shelf on all of the subscription services.

WatchGuard was brought in by one of my predecessors. I left this company for a little while and went to go work for a credit union, and that was a completely Cisco shop, so I got to experience both of them at different times.

I don't think I've actually used anything other than the Cisco ASA. With the WatchGuard it's easier to create policies, that's for sure. I like the flexible stability of being able to leverage objects in Active Directory. I also like being able to not have to create all my policies using IP addresses, and that I can actually do web domain name lookups every time. That's very handy for large, distributed stuff where you have no idea where the actual source is going to be coming from. The cloud bounces traffic from all over nowadays. So crafting rules with fully qualified domain names, FQDN, is definitely something that I did not have in my Cisco ASA.

The Cisco was a little less confusing and more straightforward. It didn't do all of the things that the WatchGuard does, so in that sense it was a little bit easier to understand. That is particularly true once you start getting into proxy actions and setting up: "Okay, cool. Once this rule gets triggered, what actions have to happen?" I do know a few people who use WatchGuard and they still have to get assistance when they look at that. So I would file that as a con for WatchGuard. Proxy actions can be a little bit complicated.

Invest in some Professional Services. Although you can absolutely pull it out of the box and deploy it — and we've done that before — it's always good to have somebody that you can ask about best practices and run a few scenarios by them. We ended up purchasing four Professional Services from our local reseller. It was good. Although they didn't really provide any answers, they were there to say, "Oh no, you're doing the right thing." It was more reassurance than anything. But I would definitely recommend springing for some Professional Services. That will make the whole process go a lot easier.

A small subset of my staff, maybe three or four people, is involved in deploying and maintaining the solution. They're all IT administrators.

We use it both for VPN tunnels and as a firewall.

Our company runs group homes. There are 140 or so sites and employees are traveling to those sites on a daily basis. They use the VPN tunnels going back to the main office to access the file servers. We also have about 12 remote locations connected by WatchGuards on both ends to create a VPN tunnel, with SD-WAN to allow traffic to go between those two sites, both for the file servers and for the phone system.

It gives us a higher sense of security. There is an easier workflow as well.

I estimate that 50 percent more users use the WatchGuard VPN than use the SonicWall VPN tunnels. Those users are able to work on documents out of the site or increase their workflow and do work while they're onsite instead of doing it later. It saves us a couple of hours per person per week.

Once it's set up, we don't have to touch it that much.

We enjoy its usability very much. It's very easy to use, especially compared to similar products. A lot more users use the WatchGuard appliance now than use the SonicWall appliance because of the ease of usability.

As long as you're using the correct model, since different models have different numbers of allowed tunnels, the throughput is enough.

In terms of management features, we have a Dimension Server set up. It's nice to be able to see where people have gone to and when they have gone there. Overall, the solution makes it easier to manage on my side. Setting up new policies, new devices, and setting up tunnels to the current devices, is easier.

The firewall secures the external perimeter.

There is a slight learning curve.

Beyond that, the only issue we've had in the past two or three years had to do with the number of current tunnel connections, and that was just an issue with our size of Firebox. We got a bigger Firebox. The old one was able to handle the load. It was just that we ran into a licensing issue. We had hit our number of concurrent tunnels. We have a lot of tunnels with the phone system. We have tunnels to and from each site for the phones to be able to talk. It was a little bit of a surprise when we came across this situation, but it's present in the documentation.

It didn't take us long to figure out that that was the reason we were having an issue. It was just our not having the forethought to make sure that what we had was able to expand to meet our needs.

We've been using WatchGuard Firebox for about eight years.

Stability is excellent. We've had no issues with the firewall going down because of the Firebox.

We haven't run into a scalability issue yet. There are over 1,000 employees including several hundred office staff. There are 20-some sites that we have connected. We had to step up to a 470 for the current VPN connections, but as long as we're on the right size Firebox, everything goes pretty well.

Whenever there's a new office site coming up, we typically add a new Firebox. We're looking at putting more Fireboxes in all of the group homes, so that's probably going to be 115 more deployments in the coming years. We plan on continuing to use it, but I don't see any issues with expanding.

We don't work directly with Cisco tech support. We work with a third-party company to handle support that we can't figure out.

We used SonicWall Next or Dell. 

The setup is pretty straightforward. It takes 15 to 20 minutes per box. We have to set up current tunnels and get a static IP address at the sites where we're putting the boxes. It requires one person for deployment and there is very little maintenance needed.

Deploying it to distributed locations is a matter of setting the Firebox up. If it's a replacement Firebox, we set it up with the same policies and ship it to the location. They can take it, unplug the old wires from the old box, put the new wires in, turn it on, and it's up and going.

There were other options. We took a look at Dell but this was the best one at the time. The usability and setup of the WatchGuard were better. Also, the maintenance was very minimal. It's almost nothing.

The other solutions had their features that were nice, but there wasn't anything that really drew us or made it stand out from WatchGuard. We're pretty happy with WatchGuard right now.

There are updates pretty regularly. There haven't been any big changes over the past few years. They've kept working, rather than taking steps backward or making things harder.

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.