NordLayer vs. WatchGuard XTM - Discontinued Product

NordLayer has become an invaluable resource for our security posture and day-to-day activity. The primary use case is preventing staff members from accessing sensitive resources on an unencrypted connection, applying NordLayer and conditional access policies in congruency. The ability to create teams and assigned them to specific dedicated servers is also helpful and allows for further security segmentation

Incentivized

WatchGuard XTM comes in different models, so you can choose the model best suited for your company size. I think it works well in small as well as very large networks. I have not used this feature, but you can create a "FireCluster" to connect member devices of the same model if you need to put multiple WatchGuard XTMs in your environment. Coming from command line, it took a little adjusting to learn which screen to use to set up the different rules. Once you understand how to set up policies, it is simple to create more. New firewall administrators would appreciate the ease of creating policies, and expert administrators should find everything they need plus extra features.

Incentivized

• Easy to use
• Simple user interface desgin
• Support many VPN protocol
• Fast and reliable connection

Incentivized

• Proxy filter.
• Link redundancy.
• Security.

• The browser plugin needs some work, or some research about what browser/OS restrictions may limit its functionality. Ours does not work at all even after contacting support so we do not use it
• Toast/Windows notifications scheduled or deployed through admin center would be amazing. The ability to remind a user who has been disconnected for X hours would be a great feature

Incentivized

• Support can be hard to work with. While they are typically knowledgeable, there can be a language barrier. Also, most troubleshooting seems intrusive which is a problem in a production environment.
• The throughput of the cheaper models leaves something to be desired.
• Have had some issues running VOIP behind these, but have not been able to narrow down the issues to the phone provider or WatchGuard yet.

Incentivized

easy configuration and use case

Again, WatchGuard is priced much lower than other vendors in its space. It may not have some of the bigger features such as Layer 7 awareness. It's more simple to manage and provides IT staff the time to work on other tasks versus time spent to create complex rule sets.

Incentivized

• Improved sercurity
• Incresed productivity
• Performance impact

Incentivized

• Easy to set up and connect firewalls
• Easy to set up branch tunnels
• Less time spent training