Steelhead and Barracuda CloudGen Firewall compete in the network security solutions category. Barracuda generally has the upper hand due to better feature reviews and deployment ease, while Steelhead excels in pricing and support satisfaction.
Features: Steelhead's valuable features include WAN optimization, data deduplication and application acceleration. Barracuda CloudGen Firewall offers advanced threat protection, central management, and SD-WAN capabilities.
Room for Improvement: Steelhead users suggest enhancing cloud integration, GUI customization, and mobile support. Barracuda users seek improvements in VPN stability, reporting capabilities, and integration with third-party tools.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Steelhead deployment is straightforward, but initial setup requires specialized knowledge. Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is preferred for its seamless deployment process and responsive customer service.
Pricing and ROI: Steelhead generally has a lower setup cost and delivers good ROI. Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, despite higher setup costs, is viewed as worth the investment for its extensive features and high-level security capabilities.
Without Steelhead, we would have spent much more on bandwidth costs.
Barracuda's partner support is better than the majority, and it stands out as one of their strengths.
The technical support from Barracuda is very good.
The overall security has been satisfactory, with no breaches.
Steelhead's support is generally good for typical issues yet can be time-consuming during complex problem-solving across teams, particularly for Active Directory integration.
Riverbed's customer service and technical support would be rated an eight.
For SME and SMB partners, the scalability of the solution is really good.
It allows us to maximize use from our MPLS providers by handling traffic efficiently across phased deployments.
We have very few issues with Barracuda Firewall, even in the case of zero-day vulnerabilities.
Version 8.0 had issues, but the newer version 9.0 seems to have improved performance regarding these issues.
It's quite stable and provides all necessary alerts if something is wrong.
Steelhead helps significantly with large data transfers.
It would be beneficial to merge the existing application policy with the main policy into a single unified policy to improve manageability.
Integration with AI would be helpful as modern attacks often utilize AI.
Some licensing aspects are challenging; for example, if you're using an active-passive setup, you have to license both firewalls.
It could still be useful in places with satellite communications, such as the south of Chile, or in the mining industry.
It would help if Riverbed could prevent such drastic impacts during updates.
The license price of Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is lower than others, and maintenance or support is included.
It is neither the cheapest nor the most expensive option available.
Buying the hardware initially is costly, but yearly maintenance and licenses are not as expensive.
Steelhead is considered an expensive solution in our country.
This integration helps secure our data and applications from attackers trying to gain access and detect malicious activity.
The most valuable features of Barracuda CloudGen Firewall are its next-generation capabilities such as URL filtering and application control.
The most valuable features of Barracuda CloudGen Firewall include antivirus protection, anti-DDoS, and IPS.
Functions like acting as an NTP server, DNS, DHCP, and auto-optimization mode enhance efficiency.
Steelhead's most valuable feature is its ability to hash and send only the important parts of the information, avoiding the resending of data.
Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is a comprehensive network security solution that provides advanced protection for organizations of all sizes. It offers next-generation firewall capabilities, including application control, intrusion prevention, and web filtering.
With its integrated VPN functionality, it ensures secure remote access for employees. CloudGen Firewall also includes advanced threat intelligence, leveraging real-time updates to detect and block emerging threats. Its centralized management console simplifies administration and provides visibility into network traffic.
CloudGen Firewall can easily adapt to changing business needs based on its scalable architecture.
Steelhead is the leading network optimization and application performance solution chosen by over 30,000 organizations worldwide. The performance of networks and applications directly impacts business productivity. Riverbed draws from nearly two decades of experience in driving network and application performance over Wide Area Networks with its flagship offering, SteelHead. SteelHead delivers the underlying technology that helps enterprises of all sizes maximize the efficiency and performance of the networks and applications used to run modern business.
SteelHead is proven to dramatically speed up the performance of applications anywhere in the organization while delivering the best end-user experience even under sub optimal network conditions. Reduce bandwidth utilization by up to 95%, deferring costly network bandwidth upgrades. Increase performance by up to 100x for on-premises applications.
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