Steelhead and Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall are two competing products in the network security landscape. Based on user reviews, Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is considered to have the upper hand in features, justifying its higher price compared to Steelhead.
Features: Steelhead is valued for its WAN optimization capabilities, which enhance application performance and reduce bandwidth usage. It also offers robust data reduction and application acceleration. Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall provides advanced threat protection, granular access control features, and comprehensive network visibility tools.
Room for Improvement: Steelhead could improve integration capabilities, reporting features, and support documentation. Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall needs enhancements in policy management, system resource usage, and user interface simplicity.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Users find Steelhead relatively easy to deploy with comprehensive customer support. Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall has a more complex setup process but provides extensive documentation and thorough support.
Pricing and ROI: Steelhead is praised for its cost-effectiveness and quick ROI due to its performance optimization. Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall, although more expensive, is seen as a valuable investment for its high security assurances.
Cybersecurity ROI could be $1 or $100 million, depending on the risk of data behind it.
Without Steelhead, we would have spent much more on bandwidth costs.
Unlike Fortinet where you can escalate an issue and quickly get responses from the development team, Forcepoint's process seems slow and challenging.
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.
It allows us to maximize use from our MPLS providers by handling traffic efficiently across phased deployments.
It's quite stable and provides all necessary alerts if something is wrong.
Steelhead helps significantly with large data transfers.
Fast response and efficient handling of issues, similar to how Fortinet responds, would be great.
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.
In terms of pricing, I would place Forcepoint in the middle when compared to other firewalls like Fortinet and Palo Alto.
Buying the hardware initially is costly, but yearly maintenance and licenses are not as expensive.
Steelhead is considered an expensive solution in our country.
With Forcepoint, this process is simplified compared to others like Fortinet.
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.
Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is a versatile and comprehensive solution for perimeter security, offering features such as SD-WAN, IPS, VPN, and cloud or on-premises subscription keys. It is preferred by many clients over Cisco and is used for obligation redundancy, VPN access, and as the main point of security in infrastructure.
The product is praised for its simplicity, flexibility, complete feature set, scalability, and central management capabilities. Other valuable features include IPS, firewall, sandbox, application control, filtering, security management center, connectivity, and integration capabilities.
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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