Barracuda CloudGen Firewall Reviews

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.

Our primary use case is for our office abroad. There are 50 of us at the office each day. We also use the firewall for working from home and calling in.

What I find the most valuable about the Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is that it allows you to see what people are doing and what the highest rate or performance is among our team. Another valuable feature is the security of this solution. To further improve security, we'll buy the F280 version of this product.

I would like to see the connection improved. We now have a one gigabyte connection and the old firewall has 500 MBs. That's not enough, which is why we are also buying a new firewall for at least one gigabit, which will give us a faster line and faster internet.

In the next release, I'd like to see more security for viruses and similar things and also block DDOS.

I have been using Barracuda CloudGen Firewall for about seven years now.

I would rate the scalability of this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. We have been using Barracuda for seven years, and thus far, we've had no issues as it was working perfectly.

I would rate the scalability of this solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. We have about 80 users currently in various departments.

Our partners usually contact their technical support. The feedback we got from our partners about the technical support was that they provide insightful and helpful support.

The initial setup took one day and it was done through third-party installers.

Implementation was done through a third party.

To further improve security, we'll buy the F280 version of this product. The F280 subscription costs EUR 3,000. There are a few extra expenses like paying for updates or new firewalls. 

The Barracuda solution has a one-off cost of EUR 3,000. On a yearly basis, with it you have extra expenses like Energize updates and Instant Replacements and Network Security CloudGen Firewall, including the monthly fees.

I would most definitely recommend this solution to other people.

Overall, I would rate the Barracuda solution F80 version an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

The last project was a project for a government, and it was to build a secure, private distributed system in two different countries.

In the last project, we choose this brand of firewall. Normally, customers are asking us which is the better solution. Normally, since Barracuda has many different features, it is quite easy to use Barracuda instead of something else, since it offers a full set of features. It has a full-feature license. It is easy to adapt the solution to the customer's needs.

It's great to have an unlimited VPN, advanced threat protection, many other features inside the proxy server, and so on. It's far easier than building out of Barracuda fiber than, for example, Check Point, where you have to buy every single module independently from the other.

It is a product that is very feature-rich.

It's quite robust.

The initial setup is very easy.

It's great for handling complex items. If you want to flag Facebook you can. If you want to create a cluster, it's easy. There are many things you can do using this product and they make it all very simple. 

The management program is something that only certain people understand. It does its own logic sometimes. It's very hard to use it. Barracuda is complex in terms of doing simple things. It could be more user-friendly. It needs to be more logical.

The price is a bit higher than other vendors.

I've been using the solution for six to eight years It's been a while. 

It is a very stable product. I've never had a problem bad enough to reboot one firewall.

The portfolio is quite broad. We can sell this firewall to very small companies or to big ones.

The scalability is easy. If you need to switch the file, you just need to contact them, switch with the IR model, pay the difference, and then you can load the old parameter file to the new one. So it's easy.

I call support sometimes. I have to admit that customer support was better three or four years ago. Now, they switched their first level of support to India. Sometimes it's quite difficult to understand the technician. Then, if you go to the second level of support, it's far easier, since they are here in Austria. It's not a problem to talk with them. The second level of support is performed by people who are writing the software. They know the product very well.

Neutral

We've also used Check Point in the past, however, it's not a full-feature solution. 

The implementation process is a walk in the park. IT's just next, next, next and you are done. You change a couple of parameters, and then you are online. Then you just adapt the firewall to the customer's needs. The setup is very easy. It's even easier if you are using the control center, even if it's quite expensive.

The initial setup itself might take 15 minutes or so. 

It's a five out of five in terms of ease of setup. 

There is some maintenance, however, it is minimal. Maybe every four years you'll need to switch the firewall. That's it. The new firewall is sent directly to the customer site. Then we just need to download the configuration file from the old one and just turn off a switch and turn on the new one.

We do the entire implementation by ourselves. 

The cost of the solution is higher than other vendors, yet with the extra cost. 

For a low-level firewall, it's likely less than 1,00 Francs a year. They work on a yearly subscription model. 

We typically buy a full-featured package that has everything inside. 

I'd rate the pricing a three out of five in terms of affordability. 

I'm working with the most recent update. 

We are reselling Barracuda to our customers.

I'd recommend the solution to others.

I would rate it eight out of ten. 

I use Barracuda to protect my network from intruders and to control application usage, as well as for bandwidth balancing and prioritizing applications. It is used for external protection and internal restrictions.

As the head of technology, I design networks and infrastructure. While designing the infrastructure, my concern is the security part, including the firewall. The solution has to be automated and I need to have proper support once I install the infrastructure. I need 24-hour support, which cannot be done on my side as my IT team is small.

The way Barracuda has helped is that, once I have configured a system, it is taken care of by the Barracuda support team. If anything goes wrong or I need any kind of support, I just call their support number and get 24/7 support. They call me back from this or that country, they take over the firewall, and they provide the solution. They are basically working as my extended support team. This is one of the advantages of Barracuda.

In addition, during the eight years I have been using Barracuda, I have had hundreds of thousands of attacks on my network and all of the attacks have been addressed by Barracuda with a proper solution for all of them. My network has never been interrupted, there has been no denial of service—nothing like that—for eight years. That's why I am loyal to Barracuda.

Overall, Barracuda has increased the speed and performance of the infrastructure by 15 percent. And it has decreased expenses in the sense that it is protecting my data. In the smallest network that we handle, the value of data per year is €20 million.

Its advanced protection against threats like malware is fantastic. As I noted, in eight years I haven't had an incident.

Barracuda provides Zero Trust access for work from home, for almost any application and from almost any device. That is important because of the Corona situation. Before Corona, we already had about 20 percent in a work-from-home situation in our network, but because of Corona, 80 percent of our work is done from home right now. That makes this feature really important. Before, it was 20 percent important, but now it is 80 percent important.

In addition, its central management, especially when it comes to distributed environments, is great. I can generate and save a setting and then apply that setting across the network with just one click.

There is room for improvement in

• performance
• the support language.

The support they're providing right now is from a different country, and in our country, there are people—network admins and IT heads—who don't speak English properly. So Barracuda needs to provide support agents who speak additional languages, such as Bangla.

Another problem with Barracuda, in my experience, is the appliance lifetime. For example, the policy for the X300 device that they sold to us was that you renew every year and, after the third year, you get a new appliance. But after the third year, they made the device obsolete. So instead of getting the next one free, they charged me for a new one. This kind of bad sales practice is not appreciated.

I have been using Barracuda for the last eight years. I started using the X300 and then the X400, and now I'm using the cloud solution as well.

On average, the firewall has ceased service or has gone down during seven days out of 365.

Deploying the solution is pretty straightforward. The problem is that the authorized distributors' deployment engineers in our country make it complex. Generally, it is self-explanatory and not very difficult. So they have to improve their local support.

One problem with Barracuda is that they don't have an auto conversion of the settings from different routers such as MikroTik or Cisco. That means you have to do every rule manually. In a small, 100-computer network, it can take six to seven hours to write all the rules manually.

The pricing is very cheap compared to Cisco ASA, which we used before, and compared to Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet. Barracuda has different solutions for different people. For my SMB-level infrastructure, Barracuda has given me a proper solution that is half of the price of Palo Alto or Fortinet.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Barracuda is that the next time I buy a product I'll make sure that the device support and the device life cycle and replacement are very clearly written on my document. In addition, I have to ensure that support is from a local team and that it will not be on a call basis to somewhere else.

The solution has a couple of use cases in VPN. We have branches connecting to the head office. We have users connecting to VPNs. We also use SSL VPN.

The encryption and the security standards are valuable.

We need high availability and load balancing. The product does not enable load balancing. We are looking for alternate solutions. We have multiple VPN channels with clients and sites. We need to ensure that the traffic is optimized so that the full bandwidth of the existing network is utilized. If the link goes down, the traffic must be routed without any downtime in the connection.

I have been using the solution for the past six years.

I rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten. We haven't faced any issues with the stability.

I rate the tool’s scalability an eight out of ten. The features are a bit limited compared to other vendors. Scaling with limited options doesn’t make sense. Around 80 people are using the solution.

We have contacted support for configuration or troubleshooting. We involve support in areas where the product lacks features. The support is quite good. I rate the support a nine and a half out of ten.

Positive

I have seen a return on investment from the solution. We will be using the device refresh feature next year. The devices will be upgraded free of charge.

The product is a bit cheaper than some solutions. It depends on the type of load.

We are partners of the product. The solution must include as many features as possible. Each environment has different use cases. The features provided by the tool must be flexible enough to address our use cases and requirements. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

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 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. 

The ease of use is very valuable, and Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is very responsive. When you make any changes, it works instantly. Additionally, they have a very responsive customer service and support team.

The UI can be improved because it looks very old and complicated.

We have been using the solution for approximately four years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have had a good experience with customer service and support.

The initial setup is a bit complex.

The solution is priced reasonably.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. It could be priced similarly to competitors like Foritnet.