WatchGuard Firebox Reviews

The big issue with data-loss protection is the end-to-end encryption between the user and whatever site they're connecting to. And that diminishes the effectiveness of the data loss protection because it can't inspect all of the data contents. Formatting is still reliant on numbers, letters, and sequences recognizable as credit cards, driver's license birthdays, etc. There's a lot of other sensitive material that could be at a client site, for example, that doesn't have a known methodology. It can be challenging to set it up to recognize instances of information unique to an environment. Unfortunately, it's even the case with a company like Microsoft. I would compare it to the data loss protection within Office 365 and say that it has the same inherent problems that you see with any encrypted email.

WatchGuard Data Loss Prevention catches so little. When I've implemented it, it just can't look at the traffic in a thorough enough manner to capture as much as it should. And I find that I'm disenchanted with all data loss protection solutions I've tested and looked at. WatchGuard certainly is not any better or worse than the others. It's just not a technology I have much faith in. 

You can get awfully granular in the setup, but it reminds me of antivirus software. True antivirus software catches very little. It's rare that antivirus software identifies a true virus. Everything's becoming more complicated, so now you need to look at detection and correlated threat response systems that are more effective than traditional antivirus. Data loss protection, I'm afraid, is kind of in that space.

We've used Watchguard Data Loss Prevention off and on for several years depending on the client's needs.  

Overall, I have utilized WatchGuard solutions for at least 20 years. I have been with them as they switched from private to public ownership and back again. So I've been a pretty faithful user for an excessive amount of time.

I find that their tech support is excellent. And as a reseller, my relationship with my point of contact is also strong. WatchGuard does a good job of maintaining that. So even if you are not getting the best response from support, you have a method to escalate it. I have so few incidents where I need to reach out to support. My most recent incident was handled very quickly, but with my experience, I don't have to call them often. At most, I maybe contact them once or twice a year. I have a lot of WatchGuard devices in service with my clientele.

It's a very simple setup.

I've never licensed it as a separate solution. It's always included in the licensing that would be appropriate for a medical facility, so I've never purchased DLP as an add-on to their basic licensing. I wouldn't say that I can give you a straight answer. It's never even come up in conversation to license it as a standalone solution.

I would rate WatchGuard five out of 10, but all of the data loss protection solutions I've looked at would be in that five range. I haven't found one that I would put much faith in.

Honestly, I think that data loss protection is just part of a whole configuration. Let's say you need granular control, reporting, and things of that nature. In that case, you need to do an extensive job configuring the firewall. It's probably insufficient to run the quick setup wizard and say that's good enough. So if you're looking to implement a feature like data loss protection, you probably need to have a relatively advanced technical person doing that configuration. So it's not difficult. But conceptually, to be effective, you need to have an excellent understanding of firewalls and firewall methodology.

We provide the solution to our customers. It's primarily used for security.

The reporting aspect of the solution is what is most valuable to us.

The solution is very easy to configure.

The product has been very easy to use.

We've found the stability to be very good.

The scalability is excellent.

The pricing of the product is reasonable.

We've been in touch with technical support and found them to be very helpful.

There are many fantastic features.

Often, customers don't end up using a lot of the features.

They should move more towards integration with other OEMs such as web application firewalls, et cetera. There should be better integration and a way to configure multiple vendors into the same data center in order to offer more flexibility. 

We've been working with the solution for about seven to eight years at this point. It's been a while. 

The stability of the solution is very good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's quite reliable in terms of performance.

We've found the scalability to be very good. There are no limitations. If a company needs to expand it, they can.

We've contacted technical support in the past. We've found them to be very good. They are helpful and responsive. I would say that we are quite satisfied with the level of support we've received.

The pricing of the product is pretty good. I would describe it as fair. It's not overly expensive.

One of our customers wanted us to compare this solution against Azure Firewall to see which would be better. We're still looking into that.

We are resellers.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. It's a pretty fantastic solution overall.

We basically use this solution to filter traffic so that the network can be secured and no one can hack the network. We are using WatchGuard as a gateway security product. It is installed on the gateway to filter the traffic for our network, stop access to malicious websites, and protect our interwork network from any kind of hack attempt from outside.

We are also using the VPN feature. The traffic is encrypted via a VPN, and no one can hack it. We are using the latest version of this solution.

The VPN and the filtering features are the most valuable. Its VPN is very strong, and its services are very nice.

The main problem in India is the service. There are not enough Check Point and Fortinet Firewall services, but for this product, the service is very good.

Its graphical user interface could be improved because not everybody is technical. There is a lack of knowledge, and they can give some training for this solution.

I have been using this solution for three months.

It is 100% stable. Our technical team had tested this product before buying it.

We have approximately 500 to 700 users who are using this solution in our company.

I haven't used their support.

It is easy to install. If we have all the required information about static IP, private and personal IPs, and network series, it takes just 10 to 15 minutes to install.

We have seven technical guys for its deployment and maintenance. 

It is not expensive. Other products like Fortinet and Check Point are of the same price.

I would 100% recommend this solution to others. We plan to keep using this solution in the future.

I would rate WatchGuard Intrusion Prevention Service a seven out of ten.

We are using WatchGuard Firebox for defense of our internal infrastructure.

I wouldn't say that Firebox has improved the way our organization functions, but rather that it protects our organization.

The solution identifies attacks on our services and, as a result, directs our attention precisely to the cause of the problem. As we are not actively watching the traffic ourselves and we completely rely on Firebox to alert us instead, the solution saves us about 30 hours per week.

The most valuable features are WatchGuard’s antivirus, traffic protection, and ease of configuration. I also appreciate their traffic analytics. 

After conducting several tests I found the antivirus is working very well. Additionally, they have a very interesting feature, DNS WatchGuard, which is checking DNS requests for phishing, among other things, and it has caught a lot of unwanted attempts and attacks.

Regarding the management features, the interface is user-friendly, and the instructions are well documented. There is a fast learning curve and everything is intuitive and understandable.

It also provides us with layered security. Firebox protects our traffic, as we have numerous Web Services that are external and which are a priority for us to defend. We don't use the rest as much.

I haven’t dug deeply into the reporting features yet or if they are working well. However, I have generated several reports and there was too much unnecessary information, in comparison with the reporting features in the Sophos firewall. Sophos' reporting is more readable and easier to configure. Having said that, reporting features were not very important for us when selecting a solution. What was important were other types of functionality that WatchGuard Firebox was able to meet.

In addition to the reporting features, I would suggest they work on an SSL VPN gateway.

We have been working with WatchGuard Firebox for about one year. Initially we got an M200 model and then switched to an M470 in a cluster.

In terms of the stability, everything is perfect. We haven’t experienced any issues.

The solution scales intuitively and quickly with any internet, meaning the solution’s protocols support any internet configuration. The connectivity scales in any location.

We could scale it to several companies with up to 100 employees and up to 1 Gb of traffic.

I would rate WatchGuard's tech support at the highest mark of five out of five. I was very pleased with them. We were working with them on the software licensing and opened some tickets related to technical issues. In both cases, they resolved the issues promptly and without unnecessary back-and-forth, unlike when working with the support teams of other vendors.

Before Firebox we used a Sophos firewall. We switched because the WatchGuard firewall offers a broad set of features and parameters that were lacking in the Sophos firewall. Additionally, the WatchGuard solution was cheaper.

WatchGuard has a comprehensive antivirus system included in the firewall and that was important for us. Sophos’ antivirus features were weak, in comparison.

The initial setup was medium in terms of the difficulty of some aspects, such as initially understanding the logic of their security policies. It took several hours to acquaint myself and to fully understand things. The whole deployment took about three days.

We initially had an implementation strategy, but it was adapted according to the recommendations and specifications of WatchGuard.

In terms of the technical aspects, I am the only who works with this solution in our organization.

Initially, we purchased the Firebox just for us but, as of today, we have deployed it to two or three other companies. The client sent us project specs with necessary internet configurations for each device, as well as the physical locations. We replicated their infrastructure in our test environment, configured each device according to their specs, and shipped the device to them. The client then connected the device with a cable to the ports outlined in our instructions and everything worked the first time.

During the deployment we worked closely with WatchGuard’s tech support team and they were very speedy in their responses to us.

The price of the solution corresponds to the quality and the feature set offered. There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees.

Before selecting WatchGuard Firebox, we evaluated the Cisco FirePOWER firewall and, in comparison, Firebox is much easier to use.

Also, WatchGuard’s solution, in terms of the cost-per-value ratio, is very balanced.

My advice would be to try this product.

As for the throughput, at this point it is hard for us to evaluate it because we don’t have heavy traffic, or at least we do not experience the traffic throughput specified for this model. Our inbound and outbound traffic is 1 Gb and the M470 handles it very well, not even stressing its components.

When it comes to the solution’s Cloud Visibility feature, they need to improve on the reporting. But in terms of the logs, it gives us very good visibility.

Overall, I would rate the solution a strong eight out of 10.

The purpose is to enhance the application control and internet access control of our company in our office and factory.

Firebox provides our business with layered security. Before implementing the firewall, we didn't have any control over application access. Now, by using the Firebox, we can control each staff member and department and what kind of application they're able to access on the internet, especially with the popularity of cloud SaaS systems. It has really reduced the degree of risk in accessing those unauthorized, and potentially risky, destinations. WatchGuard provides a pre-built database that can protect against gambling domains, for example. But the accuracy of that database still needs to be improved because, in many cases, the categorization of the website is not exact.

It has also helped with productivity. It reduces the time our networking staff spends implementing things. It has saved about 20 percent of our time. We're also doing more control than before, so we have made some effort to configure the policies, which was something we'd never done before. Previously, we didn't have any control, so we didn't have to spend time configuring or troubleshooting application control policies.

There wasn't one particular valuable feature. What I like is that 

• its pricing is competitive when compared with other brands, 
• it has all-in-one features for intrusion detection
• it has application control 
• it has email control.

Also, the load balancing and failover features cost only 20 percent more than a single instance of Firebox. Those are the main reasons we chose it.

Because we use cloud applications like Office 365 and Salesforce, we don't want all our staff accessing the whole internet. We use the application control so that they are only able to access the company-authorized cloud applications.

Because we use the firewall to monitor the external traffic as well as the internal traffic, we bought a fairly large model, the M570. We turned on most of the features and the performance is comfortable. It can reach the throughput, the performance specified on the data sheet.

Also, because we bought two firewalls, which I know is not that many — not like in the retail industry where they have many firewalls in their retail stores — still, we need a central place to manage the policies and deploy them to both devices. It's good that it provides a system management console that is able to manipulate and manage policies in one place and deploy them to different locations.

The reporting features are not as flexible as I thought before I bought it. You can retrieve some simple statistics from the centralized reporting server. But let's say I want to look at the volume of internet access among our staff. There are no out-of-the-box reports or stats or any unit of measurement that show internet access for particular staff. There is no report that shows how long they're on or the volume of traffic, especially in a particular period. It's not necessary that it have very modern BI analytics, but at this point I'm a little bit disappointed with the reporting. One of the purposes of implementing the firewall was to do more application control and reduce the risk involved in employees accessing the internet. We want to measure and know how much time of our staff spends accessing and browsing and using internet resources.

We bought WatchGuard Firebox last year and implemented it in our Hong Kong office and China-based factory. In the factory we have larger coverage and we use the M570. For our Hong Kong office we use the M370.

It's stable. So far, there have been no incidents.

Our case is quite straightforward. We only use two nodes. We still need to expand to one or two more factory locations, as well as our office. We will scale out the same solution.

I do have previous experience in the retail industry. In that industry, where you need to implement many firewalls in multiple retail stores, I doubt the management tools of the Firebox would be able to scale out for that use case. But for our use case it's good.

We haven't had any issues so we haven't contacted their technical support. It's been quite stable over the year since we implemented it.

There was no application control in our old solution and we wanted to reduce the risk of being attacked from outside. So we looked for a UTM model and the cost-benefit of the WatchGuard Firebox was one of the best.

I did a little bit marketing research locally and listened to recommendations from some partners in Hong Kong.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. It's a typical UTM.

Our implementation took about two months.

In terms of our deployment strategy, we implemented one of the firewalls. We replaced our old firewall, enabling only the internet access and left the major email traffic access. Then we defined the control by defining more specific application policies. Once it was successful, we used the same method to deploy the other firewall to our China side.

We have one person who maintains the Fireboxes, but it's really less than one because he does other administration and is not only dedicated to firewall administration. We have about 100 people in the Hong Kong office and on the factory side there are 400.

We had one internal staff member and an external consultant from BARO International for the deployment. Our experience with BARO was good. They understood our requirements and were able to translate them into an actual solution and deploy it.

We have seen ROI using WatchGuard.

We needed a firewall to control our internal network and the external access and we needed to implement load balancing and failover as well. Going with WatchGuard "increased" our budget.

WatchGuard had a very competitive price. It was only 10 to 20 percent more than a single instance device but with that extra cost it provided a second load balancing device and the licensing scheme didn't charge double. They only charge for one license, unlike other brands whose method of hardware and software licensing would have doubled our cost. That was a major consideration.

We looked at Juniper, Check Point, and one more that was the most expensive.

The usability of the Firebox is good. But the UI is not as user-friendly as the model that I had used before, which was from Check Point. The design of the Firebox UI is restricted and needs an experienced network guy to understand the format and settings. When I used the Check Point a few years ago, the UI usually guided me on how to define a policy from the source to the target, and what the objects were, and how to group objects, and everything could be seen from a simple, table-based web UI. 

The interface of the Firebox is clumsier. The settings are like a tree structure, and you need to drill down to each node in order to get to the property. It serves the same purposes, but I won't memorize all the settings. A more user-friendly user interface would reduce the number of things I need to memorize and guide me in configuring policies. It's quite good, but is not the best I have seen.

The other brands provide more professional features for reporting, the application control, and the scalability. But the strong point of WatchGuard is their all-in-one features that are suitable for our size of company and our budget.

WatchGuard is not the best. We already knew that, but it comes with most of the features we need. Although it's not the most user-friendly, we sacrificed that to keep the core features to increase our control while maintaining our budget. Honestly, there are no particular features of the WatchGuard that impressed me to say, "I must choose a WatchGuard." But when I needed several things to come together, then I really had no choice.

I would rate WatchGuard Firebox at seven out of 10. It's good, it's better than a six, but from the management point of view, it has not totally satisfied my expectations so it's below an eight or nine.

We use it to protect our web stations and service. 

We established a branch office VPN to our branch office. Since last month, we have added Mobile VPN tunnels to our headquarter.

We have the ability to use it for connecting to our terminal services, then to the Fireboxes, so we can create user-based policies, which are very important at this time. We can control who has access to management servers and machines that are not for general use by users.

We use a normal packet server. We are also using a proxy service and IPS, so all features are possible with these devices. We have seen many attacks from specific IP addresses that were all blocked. Most times, these were IPS traffic port scans. All this traffic is normally blocked from our side.

The solution simplifies my business. Normally, for administration, we are using Watchguard System Manager on Windows since it's easy to create new policies. In a short amount of time, you can create new policies based on new requirements. For example, in the last few months, many requirements changed due to the coronavirus, adding the use of new services, like Office 365, and eLearning tools, like Zoom.

With Firebox, the monitoring is good. On the Dimension servers, I can see where the IP addresses send and receive a lot of the traffic so I can analyze it. I am also able to see where attacks are coming from. It's good to see visually what policies are most in use and which traffic was blocked. Its easy to visualize policies. The dimension server shows which policy is used and the data flow through the firebox.

For our requirements, WatchGuard has very good features available in its software.

It is good for administrating devices. It is reliable and easy to use. Most of the time, the results are what I expected.

The performance of the device is good. The time to load web pages has not been slowed down too much. With additional security features, like APT and IPS, WatchGuard Fireboxes need a moment to check the traffic.

For reporting, we use the Dimension server from WatchGuard where we have many options to analyze traffic. It has a good look and feel on all websites that WatchGuard creates. All pages have the same system, so it's easy to use because the interface is uniform throughout the entire solution.

We are using some of the cloud visibility features. What we use on that cloud is DNSWatch, which checks the DNS records for that site. It is a good feature that stops attacks before they come into the network. For most of our clients, we also run DNSWatchGO, which is for external users, and does a good job with threat detection and response. It is a tool that works with a special client on our workstations. 

Sometimes I would like to copy a rule set from one box to another box in a direct way. This is a feature that is not present at the moment in WatchGuard.

I'm missing a tool by default, where you can find unused policies. This is possible when a) you adminstrate the firebox with dimension, or b) you connect it to Watchguard's cloud.

We have been using this solution for a long time (for more than a decade).

The stability is very good. I normally only do a reboot of a Firebox when I upgrade the boxes with new software, so they run sometimes two or three months without a reboot.

It is scalable to many environments. With all our locations, we found this solution works.

For the moment, we have around 80 users total at all our locations. The traffic at our headquarters per day is 300 gigabytes.

Our number of Fireboxes has been constant over the last few years, as we don't have new locations. We are a sports organization, so we are not expanding.

WatchGuard's support is very good. Over the years, there have been only one or two tickets that were not solved.

When you start as a new customer, you should start with a bit of support from your dealer so you have some training on the boxes and how to manage them.

Before using WatchGuard, we had a Linux server with iptables. We switched to Firebox because it is much easier to administrate. It has real boxes with a graphical interface, instead of command line administration.

It is relatively easy to set up a new box. In my experience, you have a basic rule set. When you start with a new box, you can quickly make it work, but you always need to specify the services that you need on the boxes. You need some time to create the right policies and services on the box. This is the process for all Fireboxes that you buy.

When you have a small branch office with a small number of policies, you can make them active in production in one or two hours. With complex requirements at your headquarters where you have several networks with servers, web servers, and mail servers which can be accessed from the outside, the configuration will need more time because the number of policies is much higher.

The implenetation was done by the vendor. For us the solution was ok. At this point my knowledge about firewall was not on the level I have today.

It saves me three or four a month worth of time because it stops malware. I don't need spend time removing malware from the client.

I think the larger firewall packages are much better because a normal firewall is not enough for these times. You need IPS, APT, and all the security features of a firewall that you can buy.

We evaluated some other solutions.

Administration of Fireboxes is only a small part of my job. I have been the network administrator since 1997. While the solution does make less work, I still need a little time to monitor all solutions. 

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).

Our primary use cases are for the firewall and for limited routing for small to medium-sized businesses. 

I had a client that was saturated with RDP, remote desktop attempts, while using a standard low, consumer-grade firewall. Putting in WatchGuard allowed me to drop a lot of that traffic and reduce a lot of load on their otherwise poorly performing Internet connection.

Reporting PCI and HIPAA compliance reporting, firmware updates, cloud-based firmware updates all make for visibility within the client site much easier. I can provide comprehensive reporting on user activity and user behavior which goes along with user productivity. It has excellent mobile SSL VPN capabilities that have allowed for very rapid deployment of remote workers during our current situation.

As a whole, it has a very low requirement for ongoing interaction. It's very self-sufficient. If properly patched, it has very high reliability. The total cost of ownership once deployed is very low.

It absolutely saves us time. All firewalls can be deployed with a very basic configuration in a reasonable amount of time. The uniform way in which WatchGuard can be managed allows for the deployment of much more comprehensive configurations more quickly. When it comes to troubleshooting and identifying any kind of communication issue, they use a hierarchal policy layout. It allows you to manipulate the order of precedence, simplifying troubleshooting by tenfold. Compared to a competitor, I spend less than 10% of the amount of time on WatchGuard that a similar task would take on a Meraki, a FortiGate, or a SonicWall.

The most valuable features are: 

• The unified threat management bundle
• Advanced threat detection and response
• APT Blocker
• Zero-day threat detection.

With most Internet traffic being encrypted, it is much more difficult for firewalls to detect threats. Some of the advanced features, such as the APT Blocker and the advanced threat protection, use advanced logistics to look for behavioral, nonpattern related threats. And the threat detection and response has the capability of working with the endpoints to do a correlated threat detection.

For most people, they don't think about one workstation having a denied access, but when multiple workstations throughout a network have requests that are denied in a short period of time, one of the only ways you can detect that something nefarious is going on is through a correlated threat detection. And WatchGuard has that capability that integrates at the endpoint level and the firewall together, giving it a much better picture of what's going on in the network.

It is the single easiest firewall to troubleshoot I have ever worked with. It deploys very rapidly in the event that a catastrophic failure requires the box to be replaced. The replacement box can be put in place in a matter of minutes. Every single Firebox, regardless of its size and capability, can run the exact same management OS. Unlike some of the competitors where you have dissimilar behavior and features in the management interface, WatchGuard's uniform across the board from its smallest appliance to its very largest, making it very, very simple to troubleshoot, recover, or transition a customer to a larger appliance.

It absolutely provides us with layered security. It has one of the most robust unified threat bundles available with Gateway AntiVirus, APT Blocker. It does DNS control. It does webpage reputation enabled defense. It effectively screens out a lot of the threats before the user ever has an attempt to get to them.

Externally it does a very good job of identifying the most common threat vectors, as well as different transported links, attachments, and things of that nature because of the endpoint integration. It helps protect from internal and external threats, along with payload type, and zero-day threats.

The cloud visibility feature has improved our ability to detect and react to threats or other issues in our network. It has improved firmware upgrades and maintenance reporting as well as investigating and detecting problems or potential threats.

It has reduced my labor cost to monthly manage a firewall by 60%.

The data loss protection works well, but it could be easier to configure. The complexity of data loss protection makes it a more difficult feature to fully leverage. Better integration with third-party, two-factor authentication would be advantageous.

I have been using WatchGuard Firebox for fifteen years. 

We mostly use the T series: T30s, T70s, some M3, and 400 series.

It is the most stable firewall I work with. The incidence of failure is very low, maybe once every two years.

It's very scalable. Because it has the unified configuration interface and the unified tools, or the common tools that are used from the smallest to the lowest, a ton of time and configuration, and thereby money, is saved during an upgrade, for example. The time to take an upgrade to a new appliance is a fraction of the time it would be with a competitor because of the direct portability of the configuration from the prior firewall.

We have one engineer and one part-time technician to maintain approximately 75 WatchGuards for limited, physical installations and onsite. It is very reasonable for one or two engineers to manage 200 to 300 WatchGuards. It's very reasonable.

We have just a single location in which we do use the T70 box and WatchGuard is in place at 95% of our clientele. We do not replace viable commercial-grade solutions until such time that they are ending their licensing or whatever. We do not replace FortiGates or SonicWalls while they're still viable. However, when the opportunity to replace one arises, it is our first suggestion to the client.

I do not or have not had to use technical support very often, but I find it to be excellent. They're very responsive and very knowledgeable. I get engineers from a similar time zone. They're very skilled engineers and very invested in end-user satisfaction. Even though they are 100% channel-driven, they take end-users satisfaction very seriously.

The complexity of configuring a Sonic Wall, for example, is much, much greater than that of a WatchGuard. Identical tasks can be completed in a WatchGuard in a fraction of the time as a SonicWall. When comparing similar models, the performance of Meraki is far inferior to the WatchGuard. Its capabilities are inferior to WatchGuard. It's a simple cloud interface. Meraki's simple cloud interface is probably more appropriate for a less experienced engineer. FortiGate lacks some advanced features that WatchGuard has, but my predominant issue with FortiGate is that when all the unified threat management utilities are enabled, performance on FortiGate is inferior. Although it has capabilities, when fully enabled it does not perform as well as WatchGuard.

The initial setup is very straightforward. I'm able to deploy a standard template after activating the device. The activation is very simple and takes just a few minutes. Then a base configuration can be applied once the firmware has been updated and a box can be prepared for initial deployment within 7 to 10 minutes after it boots. 

It took 45 minutes to set up.

In terms of the implementation strategy, I have an implementation baseline of minimum acceptable settings and then it is adjusted based on client needs.

We deploy it to distributed locations in one of two ways. The device can be drop-shipped to the user or the endpoint and a cloud configuration deployment can be pushed to the box. My preferred method is to receive the box, perform a firmware update and a base configuration, and then ship the box.

I would recommend working with a partner for an expert-level deployment. It greatly reduces the time to deploy it. An experienced engineer can then deploy the product very rapidly and can often provide instruction on how best to maintain the product. But otherwise, the deployment is very straightforward.

They are very low maintenance, they have a very high rate of my end-user satisfaction. I'm able to provide excellent levels of service to my end-users and my customers. I would say that they have a very high value and a good return on the investment.

Generally speaking, I find the three years of live and total security to be the best option. By going with their total security, you do get the endpoint protection component of the threat detection and response. Typically the trade-in options, depending on your prior firewall, are options that they should request or pursue when dealing with their provider. Those programs are usually available, but they're not always offered by a provider unless you ask.

I would rate WatchGuard Firebox a ten out of ten. 

We have multiple sites. We're in the wine business. Our corporate office is where we have accounting and marketing. Our executives are based there as is IT, HR, and payroll. That's where we have the big M200. We have five wineries that we support. Each of the wineries has a WatchGuard on it and we connect them with the business office VPN. 

We share files across our VPN and we also authenticate our users. Not all of our sites have file servers so we use the business office VPN to get them authenticated onto their machines. We also use that to go out and work on their machines if they have problems or we send files out to them and install software remotely, etc.

We also have 11 tasting rooms where we sell our wine, and each of those has a smaller WatchGuard in it. We support the computers that they use in the back office of the tasting rooms. We also support their iPads and the machines that they use to print off orders and FedEx labels and to do inventory stuff. 

We have two hospitality sites where we will take our distributors to talk to them and educate them about the wine industry and what we're doing in the industry. We provide them with internet while they're there. Some of our people will go to these sites to do retreats and planning. We have WatchGuards there to support them so they can get back to the files they need and get authenticated.

We're using a whole variety of models. We've got a couple of M200s, multiple 30s and multiple 15s. We also have about 15 of the AP120s.

The solution simplifies traffic management. It has features that let me automatically reboot the wireless access points on a weekly basis. For us, that has been really beneficial. Prior to that we had a range of different wireless access points and there was no way to have them all reboot. So people would just have bad experiences using them and we'd have to go in manually and reboot them. Once we started using the WatchGuard wireless access points, we just scheduled them to reboot automatically. 

Both the throughput and the fact that they support the two different radio frequencies have been great for us. It has paid for itself because we don't have to deal with them anymore. They're a set-it-and-forget-it type of deal.

The solution has saved me time, but it would be hard to come up with a specific amount of time. The bottom line is that I just don't have to deal with it.

• Among the most valuable features is the ease of use — love the interface — of both the web interface and of the WatchGuard System Manager.
• It's a stable platform. The devices are pretty rock-solid.
• Education: They do host regular webinars where I can go in and learn more about the product and new features.
  

Also, the throughput is good value for the money. Our corporate office is basically shut down [due to COVID-19]. We've got 100 people who have been working from home over the last month and we're using the SSL VPN connection to get in, get authenticated, to get to our files, update passwords, etc. The throughput has been good for that.

I'm impressed with the solution's reporting and management features.

If they could make the traffic monitoring easier that would be great. I don't use it that frequently, but I would like to see some improvements in the ease of use of that component, so it makes more sense. I know it's a technical component so there's going to be some difficulty trying to make that easier.

Also, if they could provide more examples in their documentation, that would help. Sometimes they will say, "Hey, go in and set this up," and it would be so much easier to do it if they put in a couple of examples and showed me. Imagine instructions on how to change a tire and the steps you go through. Give me some pictures or some examples of how you change the tire. Where do you put the jack so it doesn't tear up the fender on your car? I'm a person who loves looking at examples cause I can look at things and see how they applied them and then learn from them.

Even if they put in some snapshots and said, "Here's how this should look after you put this information in," that would help. It would be confirmation that this is accurate and this is going to work. 

Finally, when we did the split tunneling, as it turned out, that was an all-or-nothing, global setting. As soon as I did that it impacted everybody. What I was hoping to do was to set that up so that I could do a pilot group and, once it was working, I could turn it on for everybody. We needed to get it going and it was all-or-nothing. We did that on a weekend and it ate up my weekend time.

In my current position, I have been using WatchGuard Firebox since 2016. Prior to that, I was at another place and I used a WatchGuard for about 12 years.

The scalability is fine but we're not experiencing a whole lot of people using it. Our Seattle office is probably the one where it is used the most and the M200 is fine. Our corporate office has close to 70 or 80 people. And we're spread out nationwide, with people getting back into the corporate office to get files. We have our wineries where there are another 40 people or so. Some of them are smaller and would have 12 or 15 people. And the tasting rooms are typically three people.

We opened up two new tasting rooms in the last year and we've got two more that are going to be opening up and, in my requirements, I always put in WatchGuard.

For everything that I've dealt with, their technical support has been really great about helping out and helping me fix things. I just worked two weeks on a project to split our VPN tunnels out and the WatchGuard technical support guys helped me with that a couple of times.

WatchGuard was already installed here when I came onboard and that was one of the reasons I got hired. I'd had experience with WatchGuard before and I knew about the product and I could support it. They brought me in for that. And now, over the last four years, I've gone through and upgraded the hardware. The hardware was older hardware, it was out of date, so I went through an upgrade and got it back on a maintenance plan.

In working with our WatchGuard vendor, they're the ones who emphasized that we should be getting off of Remote Desktop Protocol from Microsoft because it was being hacked so badly. They're the ones who said that WatchGuard has this SSL VPN and it's free, so they just configured it and away we went.

For me, the setup is straightforward. Part of that is that I've just done it so frequently. On average, deployment of these devices takes me about 15 or 20 minutes. I know what I've done on other machines, so I just do the same thing again on new ones.

For deploying them to distributed locations, we order from our vendor. When it arrives I get it authorized on our account, go in and set up some basics, and set it up so I can get to it remotely. Then I ship it off. I've got some hands-on people, operations people, at the winery who will take it and start to plug it when they get it.

For maintenance of the solution there are three of us on the IT team.

The fact that they're reliable pieces of equipment is part of the ROI. I know when I go back into it, it's not like it's going to drop how it's been programmed. 

It also has a great function for my needs because I work remotely to many other places in Idaho, Eastern Washington, New Mexico, etc. I know I can get into that box remotely and it's going to have the configuration that I set up.

I'd love it to be cheaper, but as long as long as they're being fair with me, it's a good value.

I've never had a need to evaluate other options.

Take a good hard look at it. The interface is pretty easy to work with. The devices are consistently good. It has a lot of features and the boxes are hard-working. They just work.

I recommend WatchGuard to people when I'm at industry trade shows when anybody asks me. I think it does provide me with layered security, but I don't spend a lot of time looking into that. It's just part of my total solution package. The value that I get out of it is consistent management. It's a good product. Whatever kind of additional security they provide to me is just a bonus.