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Simple firewall for small and medium businesses
May 07, 2019

Simple firewall for small and medium businesses

Brian Walsh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with WatchGuard Network Security

We use WatchGuard Network Security as our firewall solution for our entire company. We have one in each of our geographic regions to allow/restrict access to the internet and other internal networks. We also use WatchGuard access points for our wireless network throughout our organization as well.
  • It is easy to set up and restore from a backup if needed
  • The web interface for the firewall is easy to navigate and use
  • Customer support has always been helpful and quick to respond when I needed them
  • Can't think of any time where there was functionality that was not there.
  • In both of our locations, we have had these firewalls for about 5 years now and neither of them are showing any signs of failing.
These firewalls where in place before I started this position. I am unsure what partner we worked with.
The web interface is easy to use and they are easy to set up out of the box. We had to do a reset on one of them because of a power surge and bringing it back up took less then 10 minutes with the backup we had.
The firewall was easy to set up from a factory reset state and is able to be used as soon as it comes online using the defaults.
I believe that using the simplified licensing helps smaller companies by keeping the overall costs down and not prohibiting the use of more advanced protection features that are offered.
I have used both the Cisco ASA and a Palo Alto virtual firewall and both do great jobs. But both of these firewall solutions are more expensive and more complicated to use for a smaller business and most of the features they offer are not needed at our level. WatchGuard was able to provide what we needed and at a reasonable cost for our company.
WatchGuard Network Security is well suited for our environment which is supporting around 300 people using computers and we have not had any performance issues with them. If you are planning to also use the WatchGuard access points, they can all be managed from the same interface that the firewall is managed from. If using one of these firewalls in a large enterprise environment (1000+ people), you will probably need to set up load balancing between multiple firewalls to keep performance up, which I have no experience using with WatchGuard.