KerioControl Reviews

Our main customer base is superyachts, and they have the Kerio for traffic rules and bandwidth management of the various networks on board. They can optimize traffic for crew versus owners and guests, the VIPs that might be on board. They also use it for bandwidth sharing. They usually have a mixture of the VSAT satellite internet and 4G internet access. Sometimes they have WiFi, for example if they connect to a WiFi hotspot in a marina, as well as shoreline or fixed DSL. They use it to manipulate the internet traffic, so they can say the crew uses the slower VSAT and the guest gets the fast 4G or shoreline.

They also use it to see what's going on. If the boss complains that the internet's slow, they can quickly see if someone is downloading a load of updates or streaming Netflix and they can block them. They just want to have control, as the product name suggests, over the internet traffic.

In-house, we use the NG300, but because we are a partner, we use various hardware platforms. At the moment it's nearly all the NG series, the 100, 200, and 500. The most common that we use is the NG500. I'm interested in using the next-generation, which is due out in the next couple of months, but I've also used the virtual Kerio platform on a VMware hypervisor.

There's a virtual appliance, but also software installed on a Windows PC. We build our own virtual "guest" on a host, we've done a couple of those, and then attached it to a switch with VLANs, so we've covered all platforms.

We have these Kerios on anything from a 30-meter Sunseeker, with five or six crew members, four guest cabins, and a couple of master cabins, or a master and a VIP. They might have 20 guests so there would be a total of about 30 users and some 50 devices for those users. There is also all the AV equipment. And we've gone right up to a 120-meter superyacht, with 50 to 100 crew and space for about 200 guests. We've also got a couple of ski chalets, and a private island in Ibiza. A few hundred users is its top end, but as far as network-connected endpoints go, it could be in the few thousands of devices.

The way it improves the way our company functions is through the VPN, because we offer support services. Normally, we would have to rely on TeamViewer to a computer on board, or to get on the phone and tell somebody to take pictures or press buttons, where we can't see what's going on. 

In the last year or two, after setting up the VPN, any of our guys can log straight in to the system and they are effectively on board. That is a big help because our customers are all over the world. They could be in Ibiza one day, but then they're heading to the South of France and then they're going off to Greece or crossing the Atlantic. Sometimes it's difficult to send somebody out to them quickly. They might not want to pay for somebody to come out. It could be two or three days of round-trip travel for a half-hour job. The VPN makes it more efficient. We can jump in and see what's going on. We can mimic our engineer's being on board the vessel via the VPN. That's the biggest benefit. And it's instant. Someone rings me up and I've got a single VPN connection and I can get to their networks.

We use it ourselves and deploy it to our customers, which are small and medium-sized businesses. Our use cases are for both ourselves and our clients, mainly as a frontline protection for their internal networks to filter viruses and threats as well as for web filtering to ensure employees and guest networks don't access material that wouldn't be appropriate to be viewed. It's also used for remote access VPNs so remote users can access internal servers and resources, as well as site-to-site VPNs for multi-site offices to access resources located either at the main HQ headquarters or at an alternate site.

It does antivirus, malware, and ransomware. We feel the coverage is complete across the entire spectrum of malware, viruses, and most ransomware. It also covers some types of adware, which is an unwanted program that's not necessarily bad, but there's no reason to have it.

We have a lot of other companies that were multi-site companies which had servers at different sites not talking to each other. They had remote workers or maybe they were using open RDP as their access to their internal network. These customers were getting ransomware infections and constantly just getting frustrated not being able to share resources between sites and this gives them the capability. I have a lot of customers, especially in the non-profit market, where we've had a lot of success deploying the solution. 

A lot of the non-profits also have open WiFi and the filtering tools have been great for making sure that the WiFi bandwidth isn't drained by somebody sitting there and just surfing videos. We can control the open WiFi and we can control public computers to make sure that they stay just on the sites that we want them to stay on, e.g., employment sites, training, etc. So, it's been really helpful for the non-profits.

If a tech has a basic understanding of firewalls, NATing, and security, it is amazing how quick we can teach them how to use the product to its full capabilities. We can take a half day to a day and a brand new tech who's never seen the product can pretty much understand it enough to set it up, work with a customer, and make changes that a customer requests. There's nothing better than a customer calling and saying, "We need to add this site," and instead of saying, "Well, let me open a ticket and get an engineer to look at the thing," we go, "One second," and, through the MyKerio portal, find their firewall, remote into it, make the change, and say, "Okay, test it now. Works? Perfect." Hang up the phone and we are done.

With COVID-19 and everything that has happened, customers would call us up and say, "We're shutting down. Friday's our last day. Everybody is going to work from home." In 24 hours, we could have them all working remotely. The amount of time and simplicity of getting users set up with the VPN allowed us to get massive numbers of users working remotely at businesses that had never even considered remote work as a possibility. Or, maybe the owner had a little bit of remote capability, but that was it. Just through the ease of and the free VPN client it was amazing how quickly we could roll out VPN to everybody, we had whole companies remotely working overnight.

Our client base is private yachts and on private yachts, we have different LAN connections, as well as different VLANs. Kerio Control allows us to maximize and control the different LAN connections, both from a performance and a financial standpoint.

The single largest component was the introduction of MyKerio and the ability to be able to remotely connect the challenge that we have with MyKerio. By yacht, I'm referring to the 1% of the 1% of the people that are out there with $50 million to $60 million yachts. They have satellite systems on board so one of the challenges that we have with MyKerio is the sensitivity to latency. What that means is that if you're on a landline like a DSL or a cellular connection, your ping time may be 20 milliseconds, but with satellite, because of the distances involved, those ping times could be 700 to even 1,100 milliseconds. This is a challenge that we have because just about any application or hardware device that is out in the market is not really designed to take that into account.

In this particular case, if we have a boat that is traveling from South Florida down to the Caribbean and the entire boat is on satellite and we need to be able to log into MyKerio for the boat, it's not optimized or set up for satellite communication. It sometimes becomes problematic in trying to connect to the vessel. Where if the entire boat, like on 4G or landline, then it's no big deal because MyKerio is optimized for that. 

That would be an area for improvement, but the benefit of it is that we can handle issues remotely. The other benefit is through a minimal amount of instruction to the boat, they can complete what I would refer to as basic tasks.

For example, if a boat is down in the Bahamas and the owner is on board, we typically have these in cellular and a landline connection and then on top of that, we'll have an owner, the crew, and guests. So in this particular case, we would want the owner on the fastest 4G connection. Then we would want to put the crew on the satellite connection, which may not be as fast. So it's just about optimizing the experience for the owner and being able to control the bandwidth.

The solution is used for site-to-site VPN connections and it is valued for its cost efficiency and easy connectivity. It is especially beneficial for multi-site VPNs and is used in about fifteen different components.

KerioControl has provided a financial benefit as it allows purchasing one license that includes all necessary features, including VPN, without extra charges.

Kerio Control is the primary firewall for our corporate network to the outside world. We use an IP transit that connects to an IP transit, so all the internet traffic in and out of the corporate network goes through the Kerio Control firewall. We use Kerio Control VPN Clients for our remote workers to dial into that corporate network with two-factor authentication.

We service all areas of Queensland in Australia and we've got clients from Thursday Island down to the border. We have regional sales guys, agents, and technicians throughout the state that require access to the corporate network for various reasons and that's how they get in. They require access for our call logging system and all that sort of stuff. It's the primary gateway for that. Apart from that, we also run Kerio devices in the field to do point to point VPNs.

We've had very few problems with the VPN features. Once we've set it up, it's pretty functionally user-friendly in terms of the firewall functions that we need to open and close ports on. Our users don't have a lot of problems with it. We've had to reboot it occasionally, but nothing extraordinary. Just standard maintenance rebates. Other than that, it just does the job.

We about 60 users that have access. Concurrently, there's probably only 10 concurrent users at only one time. Because of COVID, there's a lot more remote work going on. It would have been busier over that time, but I haven't actually looked at the stats since then. I know that it worked well and we didn't have any issues. Which is a nice thing not to have to worry about when there's a lot of other things on your plate.

There are only two of us that would really get in there and reconfigure the firewall. Most of the time we'll run that past TechPath anyway, just to make sure that we're not going to punch a hole. We don't intend to. In terms of checking problems, checking logs, in terms of people management as well, seeing who's been logged in, who hasn't, it's very easy to get online and get onto the device and do from anywhere. It's very easy and flexible to use.

Prior to Kerio, we couldn't uncover that data. Prior to Kerio, we were using a hardware device but it didn't have remote access or any of those features. It was something we had to do on-site and it wasn't very user-friendly. It wasn't something that management could do if they wanted to and yet this one's pretty easy if they had access.

The main example of how Kerio has improved my organization would be through the COVID shutdown in terms of just being able to scale. It scales very easily to users that weren't normally remote workers. The fact that it scales well at very little trouble to scale with the amount of users on there, and then to have no issues over that period with increased usage, it did the job. The less I know about it, the better it's doing.

It has saved a lot of time and it was a secure way of doing it too. We had a whole contact center that worked from home for a period of time and that's a 21 hour a day contact center that we moved, that was spread out across the greater Brisbane region and working on home internet connections. Surprisingly, we didn't have a lot of stability issues anyway on those connections, but Kerio didn't blink, so that was good.

We have our server in our head office, so we have offices that log into it from various other cities and run their accounting software on it.

We have several offices in different provinces across Canada and because of that, the connection has been very secure and reliable. We haven't had any downtime with it other than when we had the NG100 fail. Other than that, it's made the connection to our websites, our office, and our eCommerce sites all very reliable. That's been very important.

We're using Kerio Control to protect our solutions in data centers and to provide VPN access, via the firewall, for our clients.

We're EPM specialists, we host and build EPM platforms which are financial software platforms used by large entities all over the world.

Where previously users were connecting via exotic firewall systems with no certificates on them, Kerio Control can be used with the certificates of the customer so that customers can also see that their connections are being properly secured on the sites that they are using. That helps them identify their sites and to distinguish their connection from other connections.

The solution has increased the number of VPN clients extended to those outside our environment. All our clients that we need to visit have a VPN solution. And the ones that we host in the data center are only accessible by a VPN client.

I use it as a service for my customers. My primary target is to help my customers in the best way to protect them from the dangerous things from the Internet. As a solution, it's easy to maintain. The product is a good solver that also depends on good support and its availability of engineers.

I am using the latest version of Kerio Control. It is an old type of configuration with VPN connections. I still like the product very much.

It is mostly installed on the Linux software appliance. That's what I mostly use for my customers.

Most customers are not able to understand the technology behind it. I am always trying to explain it to my customers. When I show my customers the interface of Kerio Control and all the reporting features along with the security features within the logging, they're very impressed. I have a very good relationship with my customers because this is mostly based on trust. I show them, and if they have doubts, I always say, "Just hire somebody to check my work." For example, a year and half ago in the travel industry, there were new rules for travel agencies who give out credit cards that they must comply with PCI DSS standards. There were some things that had to be adjusted and Kerio was able to adjust for that. So, it met the demands of PCI DSS standards.

When one of the employees of my customers was using a VPN Client, I created it so they will always get a message. When the VPN Client connects to Kerio Control from the outside, they will get an email so they know when they are connected and when they are disconnected what is happening to their network. I can, as an administrator, look in the logging and see what's happening. If I really wanted to manage what is happening over a month, then I could go deeply within Kerio Control and make a text file of the logging. I could then order an export to Excel to give the customer an impression of what is happening.

Our customers don't want to worry about their IP. If it's implemented well, Kerio Control is very good product for this.