Sophos’s Cyberoam offers UTM and NGFW products. Cyberoam provides the full suite of modularized firewall services, as well as real-time reporting, for enterprise-level use.
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Stonesoft Firewall (Discontinued)
Score 7.8 out of 10
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Stonesoft firewalls were acquired and rebranded as McAfee Firewall Enterprise (MFE), then divested by McAfee and acquired by Forcepoint in 2016, and have reached end of life (EOL).
Our organization found that Cyberoam is a cost-effective solution compared to other vendors. Cyberoam was having issues with SSO for Web Filtering. For, web filtering and application blocking, Cyberoam does not contain enough signatures or data so we can not achieve the goal of all of the sites that need to be blocked. Cyberoam is great because of its ease of use feature.
Any scenario where a dedicated firewall administrator is on staff and a secure firewall solution that requires high availability is needed will be a good solution for the McAfee Firewall Enterprise product. The McAfee Firewall Enterprise however comes with some of its own parlance that is different from other vendors and does require some comfort on the administrators side when it comes to working in the command line. Added knowledge of protocols and how they interact is a must for any firewall admin but particularly for the McAfee Firewall Enterprise product due to its flexible nature. If the environment is to be mostly hands off where a very limited rule set is to be configured and not likely to change often, I would defer to a different product
Based on the SecureComputing Sidewinder firewalls, the McAfee Firewall Enterprise does similar backend containerization of each service which provides for added security in the unlikely event of failures or breeches.
Tie in reporting services (if used by the admin) provide very granular details on rules accessed and the firewalls response to the requests.
Configurable options are plentiful. Unbound DNS can be configured on each "burb" (SecureComputing/McAfee parlance for interface), similar options for sendmail while rulesets can be configured at the application level down to simple IP-filter making options for enhancing security as well as troubleshooting equally as useful.
Full control over shell for scripting and/or scheduling (cron) purposes.
Solid HA and patching architecture.
Support was always helpful, knowledgeable and insightful (especially the staff that migrated from SecureComputing).
Without mentioning an alternative brand, there is another leading company who has updated with firewall UI quite a bit. They offer an expanded line-up to meet a wider array of needs including specific appliances for web caching, proxy servers, and other products that have the same and familiar UI across the products. Each of the products does have some overlap so that customers can choose the right appliance for their use case.
After being acquired by Sophos, we saw our year-over-year costs escalate significantly since our original maintenance contract. They should consider revisiting the pricing, especially for education.
They should consider a current market analysis and see how the market is changing and adapting with other lower cost appliances for their product line up.
For an application-layer firewall the applications supported (at the time I managed them) were too few and would need to be expanded and the application ruleset needed to be expanded as well.
The remote access VPN client configuration was overly complex for the average user and would need to be supplemented with a configuration file that had already been generated. Other solutions from CheckPoint or Cisco ASA are not as complex for end user remote access.
Enhancing the GUI with a builtin "packet capture" feature would be useful for administrators not familiar with tcpdump.
The main factor is cost, as we are a startup organization. That's the main reason we choose Cyberoam stacks up against other network security services.
Compared to other firewalls I've managed (Palo Alto, Cisco ASA & CheckPoint) I would say that McAfee Firewall Enterprise was probably at the time not the leader in its field however it is a product that proved its reliability and flexibility over the other vendors. The addition of many new features usually comes as a detriment to some other area (restricted CLI, decreased logging etc.). In my experience this product gave the flexibility and options that the organization needed.
In its highly available configuration the impact on any business objective has been positive given the fact that any downtime of the firewall would negatively impact all business objectives.
