Barracuda CloudGen Firewall Reviews

The firewall is robust and performs well for us. The solution is fairly easy to maintain and monitor, check logs and updates, and do daily, weekly, and month-to-month maintenance. We've actually been very happy with the firewalls and also the support.

We have a whole lot more control over the level of protection. Most of my clients are simple manufacturers, and we use the solution to protect them from web bots. They do have an integrated firewall or integrated malware protection and antivirus protection on the firewall. They've solved a lot of service attacks and attacks from simple infection bots that we were experiencing beforehand. The solution has had no downtime since we installed it. As opposed to some other firewalls that tend to lock up occasionally, this solution has never locked up or had any issues. 

The only issues we've ever encountered have been during an update or a change, which were always solved immediately by me or through a simple call to support. The solution's monitoring and logs are very comprehensive, and I've been able to backtrace hacks. Their history logs are very easy to pull on their unit, and they keep tons of data that is way more than I would ever need as far as that point. I have one client to whom we have provided a higher level of protection. Certain machines based on IP or MAC addresses cannot access the Internet. So that took a little bit of advanced configuration to get that going. The solution has phenomenally helped that business to block internet access for certain IP addresses or MAC addresses and yet allow the antivirus and Windows updates to occur. So the solution is good enough for a simple firewall, but they're also advanced enough to do some interesting things depending on your needs.

The stability of the client-to-site VPN or the client VPN software has been excellent. The antivirus protection or malware protection has been great. I love the level of logging with it because it makes running my quarterly reports and things for our ISO certifications a lot easier for us.

The biggest downside is that it is quite an expensive product. So a little bit better pricing or some options for a little bit cheaper device would be nice. They are quite complex to get up and running for anything beyond a basic installation. They could do something better with their initial setup wizard to make things just a little bit easier. Besides that, they're pretty good as far as I'm concerned.

I've been using the Barracuda CloudGen Firewall for a little over four to five years.

I rate Barracuda CloudGen Firewall a ten out of ten for stability because their stability has been excellent.

The solution is very scalable because you can use it for a simple setup or some quite advanced features. I rate Barracuda CloudGen Firewall a nine out of ten for scalability.

Their customer support has exceeded my expectations for every interaction we've ever had. I initially called them to ask how to set up the solution, and the guy walked me right through it. He was extremely knowledgeable, and he knew his stuff. Their customer support is available anytime, and it's quite easy to get a hold of them. Their process is a little strange. You have to get a call in and give them your info, and they log a ticket. After that, they get a tech to either work with you or they will call you back if their wait times are longer. Other than that, their support has been superb.

I rate their customer support a ten out of ten because they've been fantastic.

Positive

We used NETGEAR ProSAFE models. I also have quite a good experience with the D-Link AC line. Those were the two solutions that we were primarily using before the Barracuda CloudGen Firewall.

We decided to go with the Barracuda CloudGen Firewall because we wanted something more comprehensive and more powerful with better protection. The NETGEAR model is a thing of the past, and they're no longer selling those. The D-Links are still available, but they're nowhere near the protection and features that Barracuda CloudGen Firewall provides. So we were looking for a better product for small to medium-sized businesses, especially with all the hacking and everything coming out of other countries.

The initial setup is complex. I rate their initial setup a six or seven out of ten.

Setting up the solution with the company usually takes an hour and a half. Our most advanced case took about three hours.

I've always implemented the solution in-house or in-house with help from support. Typically, just one person is involved in the deployment of the solution.

There is minimal upkeep and maintenance on the device. You can configure it, set it up, and pretty much never touch it again if you wish. You may need to do the periodic updates they release that improve its features and protection. Once it's set up and configured, you can almost walk away from it until the device quits working. So far, we've only had one actual failure, and it was due to power issues. So, they've been rock solid, and you could configure it and walk away and not have any real maintenance if you wish. Or you can maintain it and keep it functioning at the top level.

I rate Barracuda CloudGen Firewall an eight out of ten for its pricing. It's not the most expensive, but it's certainly not cheap. It costs around $2000 a year for licensing, instant replacement, antivirus, virus or malware protection, and the general support contract we use. I am not aware of any additional costs to the standard licensing fee we pay for this solution.

We have not had any major technical problems. If we do ever have technical issues, their support has been extremely helpful. It is quite a complicated piece of hardware to configure, and I would love to find better training for that. However, someone with a technical background can set them up. We usually do the hardware replacement through their system every four years. They will send you a new device so long as you have kept the hardware replacement and the support up during the four years. So that's been an incredible plus to the unit itself.

I recommend having a talented or knowledgeable IT staff install it or be prepared to call support and spend time with them to get it installed. It's not simple by any means. Beyond that, be prepared to have a little bit of downtime while you're doing the installation. It's not a quick install. It's not something you can put in and have the network up in a few minutes, and it will take you a little while. And also, you need somebody that's either quite knowledgeable about it or is willing to work with their support team to set up the solution.

Typically, the deployment model used is on-premises or an on-premise and hybrid setup.

Overall, I rate Barracuda CloudGen Firewall an eight out of ten because my overall experience with the solution has been good.

I think Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is one of the most advanced firewall platforms. I also like that it's easy to get top-level support right away. You get that security, and if you make a mistake, it doesn't break.

It would be better if they had a trace and trap feature. It's hard for me to say anything bad about Barracuda. This is because we had a firewall go down in the town of Kirkland Lake, and it was a blown-out port, and they had an instant replacement. 

I have been using Barracuda CloudGen Firewall for many years. I have had it ever since I worked with CalGold.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is a scalable solution.

It's easy to get top-level support. In contrast, Cisco takes a layered approach with its support services. That's why Barracuda is a little bit on the cutting edge. 

I've worked with many others, including WatchGuard, SonicWall, and Cisco.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

I have set it up myself multiple times. You can also pay a third party and call them during the process, and they will walk you through it.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Barracuda CloudGen Firewall a nine.

Much quicker deployment, ease of troubleshooting and better cost compared to our previous solution.

• Ease of use and troubleshooting.
• Very easy to quickly identify issues and resolve them.
• Add-on features such as Virus Scanning, ATP, and web filtering - These features add another level of protection and block malware before it gets to the end user. 
• Single device, multiple functions - I do not need to purchase a web application firewall, a proxy server, a VPN device and so many others because these are all built in to this one device.
• TINA (Transport Independent Network Architecture) VPN features - Allows automatic VPN configuration with little or no input from the tech. Drag and drop lines between Barracuda units and the VPN is automatically built.

Can be underpowered if you choose to use all available add-on features. Just be careful when sizing your unit. Make sure you take into account what features you will be turning on, and work with your sales rep to get the model that can handle that load.

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

I would rate the technical support nine out of 10.

This product was much easier to deploy, manage and troubleshoot than my previous solution.

Straightforward, very intuitive.

Pricing is good. Licensing is pretty much automatic if using Control Center.

Cisco and Fortinet.

I rate it a nine out of 10 due to its ease of installation, great technical support, very intuitive user interface, and numerous features.

Go through the training course.

Our primary use case is protecting companies from hackers. Everyone is vulnerable and it's a challenge to protect everything. 

Improvement should focus on fixing vulnerabilities. One of the issues with firewalls is that they don't dynamically update. If you experience an attack it can take a very long time to find a solution. It's the same issue with the Microsoft operating system which has all kinds of vulnerabilities and they put patches on to fix them. Firewalls are similar. 

It would be great to see a sharing of information but this is unlikely to happen. Everything in the industry is proprietary. It's similar to Dell computers, everything is proprietary and Barracuda is the same. They want to protect what they're doing with the firewall and so they don't want you to know how they work. For the user, there are tech people like network managers and security managers who won't share information about their vulnerabilities so you'll never know what's wrong. You know enough to use the product but not enough to enable you to solve the real security issues. 

At some point, they'll probably need to develop frequency hopping to make hacking more difficult. 

Scalability is always good because the company wants to be able to handle large customers. They can deal with both small businesses and massive companies. The ones I've worked for had thousands of computers. There are people still running Windows XP and Windows 10 and then you've got Mac users and cell phone connections. Scalability is there but it's a lot of work.

Technical support is quite poor, similar to Cisco. Technical staff are usually people that they've hired who are generally inexperienced. 

Initial setup is very complex and the firewalls can sometimes be unpredictable. A lot of this is connected to encryption. Every bit of encryption slows things down but if it's too light there's not enough protection. 

All the firewall companies such as Fortinet tend to go after certain markets. All the highly regulated industries such as banking and security exchanges have to follow a lot of rules. Firewalls can't provide them with all their specific needs. A lot of our time is spent trying to fix their problems. Our problem is that they all run different operating systems so it's difficult for them to do a good job at protection.

In another area, the more variation in equipment creates more issues. If you had a thousand computers, all identical and doing the same job, you wouldn't have as much trouble as you do when there are a thousand computers with 500 variations all doing different things; document control, engineering, facilities management and the most difficult to deal with is material management. 

I would rate this product a five out of 10. 

It is used to secure our local area network and provide VPN access for outside connections. We have its latest version.

Its ability to block incoming attacks is valuable. Its logging, traffic monitoring, and VPN capabilities are also valuable. 

The biggest issue that I have with this solution is that it is not super intuitive. Once you know what to do, things make sense, but you can't just open the program and start doing things. It would be great if there was a little bit more guided usage inside the program.

We got it around the end of 2018. So, it has been about two and a half years.

Its stability is great.

Its scalability is great. Currently, we have about 20 users. The model that we have handles up to 3,000 users. So, we won't have to scale it soon. As we get new employees, we will scale it up, but at this time, we don't have any big plans.

I have called their tech support a lot. They are great.

We had a SonicWall Firewall in place before this.

Its initial setup was of middle complexity for me. Some parts of it were really straightforward, but there were a couple of complex things. Most of it was straightforward, but the complex things were pretty complex.

We did it in-house, and we also had the company's tech support for a couple of items, but most of it was done without tech support on hand. It took two days for everything.

In terms of maintenance, I manage it myself, but it is not something that has to be managed every day.

Its licensing is on a yearly basis. There is an upfront purchase price, and there is also an annual maintenance fee. There are no additional fees.

I would advise others to make sure that they understand their network before trying to set it up. They should understand what they want the firewall to do and make sure that they know what needs to get through the firewall.

I would rate Barracuda CloudGen Firewall an eight out of ten. I am very happy with this solution.

Our primary use case is the need for a VPN site to site connectivity across 30 or more sites. We employ the URL filtering, antivirus protection, malware, advanced threat protection, application control and identity fire walling. We're a customer of Barracuda and I'm a system administrator. 

I like the identity fire walling, malware protection and application control features. Those features provide us with the ability to give individuals or groups of users specific application access with the confidence that you have malware protection.

The solution could be improved with visibility into the traffic about what's happening at a given time. I think the analytics are weak and although it appears to be doing its job, it's difficult to know exactly what it's doing. 

I would like to see complete, real time and historical playback of all traffic and the amount of bandwidth utilized by each network.

I've been using this solution for three years. 

It's scalable but it's worthwhile scaling up physically before you need it. It means you basically have to overestimate the size of the appliance you're going to need. There isn't any trade up as you go kind of plan. If you think you're going to need more horsepower, you need to plan for that in advance so you're buying up more than you'll end up using. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

I think the technical support is very good, I haven't had any problems with them. 

The initial setup was a little complicated and it required an implementation strategy. You need to plan your VPNs and fail-over capabilities, the method or the order in which you build in your additional network settings is very critical. If you don't do it in the right order, nothing works and you have to restart the box which nobody wants to do. 

The licensing cost varies according to the size of the box. The 600 series is about $USD 10,000 a year and the 80 is $400 a year. There's a big difference.

If you're going to need advanced visibility into new areas, then you should plan on purchasing a third party product to be able to capture everything and you will then need to build that cost in. If you don't do that, you're just not going to have that visibility.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

Our company installs and maintains solutions, mainly firewalls, for clients. We are resellers and I'm a consulting engineer. 

I like the use of the dashboard or the control panel to be able to manage multiple firewalls in either one entity or across multiples. The solution is fairly easy to configure.

I think the command line could be improved. In Cisco, Palo Alto and Juniper, the command line is a little more friendly. Everything I do is command line, I don't use a GUI interface. So you get used to using commands in the command line that have better command line tools.

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The stability is great, I haven't had any issues. 

Scalability is good - there are many different models and you can pretty much go from small shop to giant ISP.

I've used the technical support and they do a great job. 

I'm using a variety of solutions so my comparison would be with Cisco which I've been using for 15 years. I like their control panel very much and prefer it to the Barracuda control panel when it comes to managing multiple devices. 

Implementation is usually straightforward. 

It's worth getting somebody who knows the solution to install it. Each of the firewall solutions has its own little quirks, but there's not a big difference between all of the upper level solutions - Barracuda, Juniper, Palo Alto, Cisco - they're all very similar and all do roughly the same thing. We generally recommend Barracuda to our clients. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution specifically for the security of our environments.

The is SIEM is very valuable for us. 

The dynamic VPN is great.

Their GPS possibilities and the security that it has, especially the SD-WAN functionality, is very good.

There is always room for improvement on the solution. 

Their client VPN is not always working that well, so on computers specifically that could be something to change.

It is pretty expensive, but I think all of the solutions are, so it's something that's expected.

There are some bugs that are in the program. Occasionally when there are updates, there's a bug or two that you might find that cause issues. There was a major issue for a while, and I don't know if it's fixed yet with a third-party VPN provider.

If you have another brand of VPN where you have to put an SSL VPN between two devices, Barracuda doesn't support that at a certain point. You can't actually build the VPN between Barracuda and a different device of a different brand.

I've been dealing with the solution for five years.

The stability of the solution isn't ideal. There are bugs and issues with updates occasionally.

The scalability of the solution is excellent. You can really scale and copy content and update and deploy centrally.

We've contacted technical support a lot. They used to have really, really good technical support. Lately, however, it's a bit less impressive than before. I've heard this from my technicians. It used to be a lot better.

The initial setup is straightforward, however, much like every firewall, there's a lot that can go wrong. You need some decent knowledge of the product. It is complex for somebody who is starting with it and has never used it before. However, it's fairly easy to manage via the control center. It's a pretty easy firewall to work with.

The solution costs more than 800 Euros to purchase an F18, which is an entry model, and then another 500 Euros for instant replacement, and 500 Euros for energized updates. The total package would be around 1,900 Euros for a five-year license and all updates for an entry model.

We are a Barracuda partner.

We have firewalls in all of our data centers and have a total of around 200 firewalls.

I would advise others that it's really a good product for SD-WAN, and for security. I would advise them to consider other products as well. Companies should certainly consider it for security features. For us, it's probably more of an SD-WAN product to really set up good connections between sites, but not a really in-depth security product per se. If a company needs more security, they should look at and compare different products that may really focus more on the security aspect. The solution has far fewer features than Sophos, for example, which is more security-driven.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten because it offers SD-WAN functionality and an easy zero-touch deployment. If you have a lot of sites and you need to connect them to each other, it's a really good product.