Barracuda CloudGen Firewall vs. VMware SD-WAN

I would say a small business with a basic firewall and security needs would be a perfect fit for the Barracuda CloudGen firewall. I know that they soon end up leaving the NG models and are moving forward with the F series firewall. I think the F series is a much more difficult to manage device and doesn’t offer simplistic configuration or use and lacks cloud control so I don’t understand the move on Barracuda’s part to nix a great easy to manage the firewall. I do think that the NG line is maybe too simple for bigger businesses and would lack some main features that they would require.

Incentivized

VMware SD WAN is a great solution for tying multiple locations together that are not physically located close. The link aggregation used in the technology allows for quicker failover to redundant connections, which makes the surface traffic seem to be uninterrupted. If planning to connect multiple locations while utilizing the existing internet, Veloclouds SDWAN provides stable and accurate aggregation of connections that provide a good sense of stability for the price.

Incentivized

• The management software is excellent. It make it much easier to manage the firewalls than some of the other vendors.
• Watching real-time traffic is easy to do when trying to troubleshoot a users issues getting to a particular service.
• Support from Barracuda has been excellent. We rate their phone and online remote support as being the best in the business.
• We like the QoS and Traffic shaping of the NG Firewalls. They help is manage our limited bandwidth, so that business critical resources are available over lesser critical resources.
• Integration with Active Directory makes it easy to identify users activities in logs.

Incentivized

• Direct cloud access.
• Scalable growth for network infrastructure.
• Flexible control over application data flows.

Incentivized

• Very complex and steep learning curve to get up to speed.
• Multiple ways to configure for the same service or feature. Takes time to determine "your" customized build.
• Interface can sometimes be clunky when trying to determine how it's organized or arranged. Again, steep learning curve.

• The learning curve of deploying VeloCloud is steep, so unless you're a networking expert, the initial setup might be over your head.
• I think they may be able to improve their web interface to provide a better user interface.
• I've experienced a couple of interesting bugs which have required reboots to resolve.

Incentivized

Easy enough to use and configure using the management UI. Reporting from the web filter is a little clunky, and not very user friendly. To be perfectly honest, once it's set up and running, there isn't a lot to do from the day-to-day side of things, which is not a bad thing.

I could go on and on about how good Barracuda's support really is. I have yet to have a problem they didn't help me fix and I always learn something when talking with them. The story that best describes my overall experience with Barracuda's support is this: When I first put in the xSeries they had a problem with a policy route. There was a bug in the code and in the one situation I was it, it just would not work. I went up the levels of support and they couldn't fix it. Well, next thing I know I am on the phone with 2 of the guys that programmed the thing and they work out the solution in no time and get me going. That is support. That is what I have come to expect from Barracuda. If the tech on the phone doesn't know the answer, they do not stop until they find it. Grant it, I also have to admit I do not call support with every problem, I try to work it out on my own first as that is how I learn best, so when I do call support it is going to be complicated.

Incentivized

Its good.

Incentivized

Our Cisco firewall was always difficult to make any changes against. It had no user-friendly GUI interface. We were calling technical support most of the time whenever we needed to make any changes. The Barracuda CloudGen Firewall has a GUI interface which we are looking forward to getting better acquainted with as we move off of our old Cisco. Of course, Barracuda's technical support is always there and is top notch!

Because the FortiGate is a true firewall with all the UTM features, that is the only thing that I would say beats the VC in that aspect. Silverpeak has a very nice solution, but it is a bit cumbersome when using the GUI to configure and manage. WatchGuard is a UTM firewall, but fall short on the SD-WAN portion of their solution compared to Velocloud.

Incentivized

• We saved multiple thousands of dollars the first year out with the firewall in maintenance fees. We paid for the firewall and 3 years of service and still saved money.
• The ease of management allows me to do my job more efficiently. I save a lot of time when doing my day to day job because I can get to my firewall virtually anywhere.
• I feel a lot safer and my business more secure knowing that I have configured things the way they need to be and it was simple and not overly complicated.

Incentivized

• Inclusion of this product has led to our removal of old point to point and self managed wireless tower communication.
• Switching to Velocloud SDWAN allowed us to remove distributed repository style framework and embrace a newer option.
• Switching to SDWAN has already mitigated several instances of connections going down and the quick failover means there was no business interruption.

Incentivized