Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud is a unified platform of cloud-native services designed to help enterprises regain control over their IT environments. Powered by an intelligent, programmable global cloud network, it is built to offer security, performance, visibility, and reliability.
$20
per month
WatchGuard Network Security
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
WatchGuard Network Security is a network security and firewall software. WatchGuard includes secure Wi-Fi, multi-factor authentication, and network intelligence products and services designed for SMB’s.
Based on my experience, Cloudflare is well-suited for high-traffic websites and probably e-commerce platforms. Cloudflare can mitigate the risk of attacks on these websites using WAF and DNS protection mechanisms and provide cached content to the end-users quickly. The websites where it is not suitable are those that need high security and compliance requirements as Cloudflare might not meet all those criteria.
WatchGuard Network Security is well suited for everyone's needs but isn't well suited for a price conscience consume. They are overpriced for what they are and have a semi enclosed licensing model, so it's hard to use them after their 5-year life cycle has expired. You are forced into another model once your device is EOL even if the device is more than what you need hardware wise.
Registrar and DNS services are impeccable, with registrations done at cost and without ADs. DNS services setting standards for speed of resolution.
DDOS protection. With their content distribution network to back them they have the bandwidth and tools to be both proactive and reactive to bad actors.
WAF - Their Web Application Firewall helps mitigate common site vulnerabilities and has active zero-day protection running for breaking exploits
In some cases, using Cloudflare can actually lead to slower website speeds if the network is congested or if the website's traffic is particularly heavy.
Some website owners may find that the level of customization offered by Cloudflare is limited, especially in comparison to other solutions.
While Cloudflare is easy to set up and manage, it may be too complex for users who are not familiar with web technologies.
Sometimes, it is not very intuitive. You'll not know how to use certain features unless you read the documentation.
Some settings in the firebox are not visible unless you enter edit mode. This can cause inadvertent issues if you make a change when you just want to review the settings.
The use of blocks in the design of the Firewatch interface can be confusing. A better design could have been used.
I'm giving this note to WatchGuard Network Security due to its ease of daily support (after acquiring necessary knowledge in the solution), which allows agility in configuration changes, its integration of several reliable security features (such as SSL VPN, VPN Virtual Interfaces between companies, and others) and functional and stability in operation, with no downtime in the equipment due to problems or malfunctions
Everything is extremely concise and all settings apply immediately and take effect globally. There is no reason to explicitly plan/think in terms of individual regions as one would have to traditional cloud offerings (AWS, OCI, Azure). All Cloudflare products integrate seamless as part of a single pipeline that executes from request to response.
Although it might take some time to figure out, we have been able to use WatchGuard's online reference library and tech support to create/implement/modify all of our filtering rules and exceptions needed. There really has not been a shortcoming other than perhaps a learning curve.
Availability has always been a strong point of this product, it is rare that watchguard does not have a solution for customers' network monitoring needs.
The performance of WatchGuard Network Security is very good, in the years that we have used the solution we have only had a single error and Watchguard itself was able to solve it. Furthermore, when purchasing any product, the partner always evaluates the capacity of the solution to recommend the most appropriate product for our needs.
I have only used their support a few times, and most times, they are responsive and able to resolve my issue with a minimal amount of time and effort. However, there was one instance where I simply asked about how to purchase some more resources (redirect rules), and I received some type of automated/AI response that was very unhelpful and gave me no opportunity to escalate to a person.
We have only had to contact them once during the initial set up to help bring the internet back on line. After that for the most part our systems have been automated, and could easily be checked form their online FAQ and Knowledge base that they provide. Everything else is easily handled from their browser based interface
We participate to a in person training and the three days of learning was really useful and complete to gain skill to solve the major part of the problem we encounter during our life. And more the in person training give us the opportunity to create a network with other WatchGuard partner.
I had my key information for setting up the firewall, and they assisted me in finding the settings and appropriate places to enter data. They also helped troubleshoot when I didn't understand some of their feature concepts, and we got it running.
I honestly feel they're best in class, I've used other platforms but when it comes to comprehensive security I don't think they offer as many features, or the level of security that we needed. Again the support has been excellent for us too, and keeping our firewalls up to date has proven simple and pretty straight forward.
This product is very scalable since previously everything related to Watchguard was on premises but that has now changed with the inclusion of watchguard cloud. Now the product has evolved to have full control of firewalls at the cloud level.
A lot of requests are cached and so egress costs from downstream providers are mitigated.
DDoS protection has also managed to keep our site up and our cloud computing bill down.
Setting up a proxy with a worker made putting various Google Cloud Functions running behind a single URL very easy and performant. Plus they offer API Shield on top of this.
Increased Productivity - uptime has greatly increased form old system. I believe the percentage would be a decrease in downtime of 35 to 40 percent.
Compliance and regulatory ROI has helped financially offering the WatchGuard Network Security setup for protection to our insurance company. This proof of security has saved us thousands of dollars on our liability insurance.
On the negative side - Performance overhead when implementing deep packet inspection and VPN encryption effect performance of WatchGuard Network Security.
