GFI KerioControl vs. Stonesoft Firewall (Discontinued)

IT works very well in the non-profit and small business space when there is a need for remote access or connecting several sites in a point to point VPN, user management and rule creation are very easy. The use of the MyKerio website for remote management also makes it easy to troubleshoot problems and make changes if technical staff are not onsite.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• VPN for Remote Employees
• Point to point VPNs
• Scanning of traffic
• Ease of management
• Website filtering by both sites and key words

Incentivized

• 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).

Incentivized

• Support can take longer to respond that it should
• Could work better with resellers
• Spend more effort on adding new features

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

Very easy to use and manage, user training takes less then 10 minutes. Technicians can perform basic tasks with less then an hour of training and can master it in under a year.

Incentivized

Support is very slow to respond and it takes a long time to convince level 1 techs that you need to be moved up to someone more senior. I believe support is outsourced and they are graded on how few tickets they need to escalate to higher tiers so they will try to figure out a solution even if it is detrimental to the overall support experience.

Incentivized

We found Kerio Control to provide the most features and easiest management of all the solutions we looked at, while cost was not the lowest the value was by far the best when you considered all the factors, costs, and manhours involved in deployment and management.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Easy to use makes it easy to train, reducing employee time and IT staff costs.
• Statefull inspection and web filtering greatly reduce malware incursions.
• Fact it can run on standard PC hardware greatly reduces cost to implement and makes scaling much less expensive.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized