pfSense is a firewall and load management product available through the open source pfSense Community Edition, as well as a the licensed edition, pfSense Plus (formerly known as pfSense Enterprise). The solution provides combined firewall, VPN, and router functionality, and can be deployed through the cloud (AWS or Azure), or on-premises with a Netgate appliance. It as scalable capacities, with functionality for SMBs. As a firewall, pfSense offers Stateful packet inspection, concurrent…
$179
per appliance
Trend Micro Cloud One - Workload Security
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Trend Micro Cloud One Workload Security (formerly Deep Security) is cloud security software suite, from Trend Micro, for hybrid cloud environments and virtualization security.
For fast-growing or SME companies, pfSense is quite suitable because pfSense already had many advanced features such as VPN and multiple WAN / LAN. As a result, we just need to pay for expensive router frequently to upgrade our infrastructure.
Hypervisor based agentless security this product excels at. It provides thorough protection for your VM's. The web filtering product that comes with it also does a great job filtering out malicious websites from being accessed by users with a very user friendly prompt that they are going to a website which has been found to be malicious. This is particularly useful when it comes to VDI.
pfSense is an excellent firewall - It logs all of your traffic. It has packages you can install to snort bad traffic.
pfSense has a tool called "p0f" which allows you to see what type of OS is trying to connect to you. You can filter these results and you can also block a specific OS from connecting to you.
pfSense is an excellent load-balancer: (Multi-WAN and Server Load Balancing) The fail-over/aggregation works very well. This is perfect if your business uses multiple ISP's to ensure your customers are always able to access their data. Also helps with bandwidth distribution as well.
VPN's - I am not entirely sure if this package was free with pfSense, but it does offer the ability to use OpenVPN which is what I am familiar with.
They also have IPsec in the settings as well, but I am not familiar with that enough to go into any detail with it.
As I mentioned I do use OpenVPN the only thing I don't care for with it is I can create OpenVPN configs for each user I want to be able to VPN into the network and I assumed each one would be "unique" but this does not seem to be the case. I could be doing it wrong, but if I create a config for a specific employee I would expect only that employee should be able to use that config, but I have been able to login to everyone that I made using my credentials.
I mentioned earlier that pfSense had a GUI.
I personally really think it is cool because it has a bunch of reporting graphs for monitoring your networks. I think when I become the full-time admin at the company I am going to try to talk them into getting me a TV I can mount on the wall and display all the graphs and real-time info pfSense shows so I can monitor what is going on with the network(s) at all times. Plus I think it would look rad.
There is no API for making changes. This can be a hindrance in environments where auto-deploying something needs firewall rules or HAProxy configs updated. Since all settings are stored in an XML file and then configs are generated from that, even manually updating config files cannot be done.
Beware that some network cards can have issues. pfSense is based on FreeBSD, so it's best to look on their compatibility list before deploying.
Trend Micro has very little room for improvement. I am using version 9.6 at this time and it is extremely reliable. Some of the upgrades were not completely intuitive, but in those cases Deep Security support came through with documentation that covered all the bases.
Trend Micro's support is pretty decent, we have had issues in the past and they have been fairly responsive to us and our complaints. Depending on how severe the issue was. Any ticket that had a high priority was handled very shortly especially when we contacted our account rep even if it was after hours, we were still able to get support within a short time period.
Before pfSense we were using consumer and small business rated network appliances from Linksys, Cisco, Buffalo and Netgear. We were replacing them on average of every 6-12 months because they'd fail or would offer poor wifi availability. Switching to pfSense allowed us to use professional grade switches and wifi access points, offloading all of the services that the consumer grade products took care of, onto pfSense (DHCP, DNS, routing, firewall, VPN, etc).
We selected trend micro to take the AV scans and filtering out of the hands of the Windows and Linux vm's we have deployed and move it to the hypervisor level. This has led us to be able to deploy only a single DSVA per host and can protect all VM"s that are on that hosts. This has allowed for more time being spent on other priority security tasks.
Moving to a FWaaS solution installed on a decent computer the initial investment was moderate to cover 50 to 250 users, but still being cheaper that a Fortinet, Cisco ASA, or a Sophos UTM.
Paying only for support can be a double edge knife, cause you need to identify what's the goal of the request, or your drown into a an endless list of requirements.
To stay in the top with the half of a regular investment pFSense gives a wide variety of plugins that will give you a deep knowledge of your security flaws and strong points.
100% positive ROI. Without Deep Security we would have to leverage and endpoint protection management solution like Sophos or SEPM (Symantec). Although both are good products, from a cost perspective it would have hit us much harder. Trend Micro Deep Security scales very nicely.
Since Deep Security actually has zero (or at least unnoticeable) resource footprint on monitored VMs, it is a huge cost benefit for us. As previously mentioned, actual antivirus clients installed on each virtual machine (VM) would have significantly affected performance. This would have cost us much more additionally in paying for additional resources to allocate over VMs in the VMware environment. Deep Security is almost completely unintrusive from a resource perspective.
Also, from a layered security perspective, it helps us meet our goals; and since the price of Trend Micro Deep Security quite reasonable, it is that much easier to get approval for this specific internal layer of security.
