Reliable, Simple to Configure and Maintain
November 14, 2023
Reliable, Simple to Configure and Maintain
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- WatchGuard Network Security
- WatchGuard Secure Wi-Fi
Overall Satisfaction with WatchGuard Network Security
We use WatchGuard Network Security both internally and at most of our clients to provide a secure network firewall that balances ease of configuration and maintenance with a high level of functionality and security. Over the last 8 years I have deployed dozens of WatchGuard appliances and we've been highly impressed with the reliability they've provided, with under 5 units requiring service, and all of those were replaced quickly by WatchGuard to minimize downtime.
- Ease of configuration
- Reliability
- Security
- Network Functionality
- Configuration of security controls can be unclear at times.
- Cloud management is a great addition but could use a little fine tuning.
- Smaller appliances don't have simultaneous dual-band Wifi
- High reliability has not only limited the time I have to spend maintaining my own network but has also made them an easy sell to smaller clients who balk at the price tag compared to a home router.
- The ability to configure a dimension server to ease log collection and analysis has cut down significantly on the man hours required to monitor and maintain all of our various clients.
- Rapid replacements in the rare instances of failure means that we are able to get failed units swapped out fast and so this limits the number of backup devices we need to keep on hand in case of outages.
Particularly the switch to cloud management has made remote management and monitoring far simpler, we can now just log into a central portal to make changes and check the status of devices. The UI is better than using the onboard interface, particularly when it comes to logging and managing WAPs.
They have been working great so far, we've been able to further improve our efficiency by utilizing their cloud interfaces for monitoring/maintenance/configuration. Coming from years of experience configuring everything locally there was a slight learning curve to adapting to do all this in the cloud however once I was more familiar with the new paradigm it was clearly the better way to go.
We had previously deployed Sonicwall appliances and found that Watchguard's were simpler to configure and troubleshoot, monitor and were far more reliable. Our experience with Sonicwall's was that they worked well, but the initial configuration of rules and policies could be extremely obtuse and so we spent a lot of time getting everything up and running initially. As well we found monitoring and troubleshooting to general be more time consuming. Finally we rarely had a Sonicwall unit reach end of support without failing at least once, as such we've managed to switch the majority of our old Sonicwall clients to WatchGuard simply by waiting for the appliance to fail and then replacing it with a WatchGuard appliance.
Do you think WatchGuard Network Security delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with WatchGuard Network Security's feature set?
Yes
Did WatchGuard Network Security live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of WatchGuard Network Security go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy WatchGuard Network Security again?
Yes