Firewall/Filtering Replacement - when to start looking??

[mdrabble]

We currently use Smoothwall - had no major issues with it and overall I am happy with how it works etc.

 

The current contract expires Jan 2017 - So how soon should I start looking?

 

I could take the easy option and replace the Smoothwall appliance and renew support contract but I would rather see what other products are available and see how they compare to smoothwall.

 

Cheers

[Quackers]

Fortigate by fortinet is an alternative , its what we use.

[NeustroEduIT_Christine]

Morning

I would say its best to have a browse over the Summer Holidays, then come September start to get trials/proof-of-concepts in which gives you a couple of months to review different products and pricing, to ascertain which is the best fit for your School.

[Iain.Faulkner]

I'd probably agree and say I wouldn't start looking at it until September.

 

We're a Smoothwall school (although that is partly due to an agreement with our LA where they pay the licensing costs for us) and are very happy with the product. We were formerly a Bloxx school but haven't regretted moving away.

[colly72]

Sophos UTM here. Works well in general and provides a lot of functionality in one box

[kennysarmy]

We moved from the RM SmartCache product to the Smoothwall about 4 years ago and on the whole have been pleased apart from the reporting site, which is appalling.

[altecsole]

Fortigate by fortinet is an alternative , its what we use.

 

How have you found Fortigate? What's the reporting like?

[Gaz]

What about Sophos UTM? you can download the home (fully functional but limited to 50 IPs) version to try out at home.

[Quackers]

How have you found Fortigate? What's the reporting like?

 

Reporting on it is amazing, BUT you have to get the addon of forti analzyer to do anything decent as the built in stuff is minimal. For example it takes 4 seconds to give me the top 200 search queries for today. Gives me daily email reports about attacks from the internet on our web servers, what attack it stopped, what IP was attacking. User reporting i can get a very detailed view of google searches by a particular user plus every website access in a nice table listing URL, time, action (blocked, allowed) and category it was in.

 

When i looked at the spec sheets before buying years ago Fortigate wipes the floor with its competitors performance wise / sessions per second i believe this is a lot to do with they use ASIC processors and not x86. We have the Fortigate 200D which was about £6000 you can see on the data sheet the throughtput it can handle http://www.fortinet.com/sites/default/files/productdatasheets/FortiGate-200D.pdf

 

It has a big learning curve as it can do so much.

[RLR]

Currently use smoothwall and works well. There's a few things we'd like extra but we have to pay extra for the modules. We'll probably look into Fortinet when the time comes round.

 

Rob

[grdrager]

We're currently running Smoothwall that is up in March of 2017 which we will not be renewing. I'm looking now and will likely return to my previous filter which was an iBoss.

[tom_newton]

Give yourself 6 months. The last thing you want is to force your own hand by coming up against a renewal with not enough time. Talk to your smoothwall rep as well - let them know what you like about anything else you are looking at.

[twin--turbo]

I am with Tom, 6 months at the very least, and perhaps look to implement side by side in the autumn term. Recreating what you have in another product can take a lot of effort. Make sure you look at them all closely and make sure they do what you need as each have different approaches.

 

We have sophos SWA and the reporting is fairly rubbish, I had to put in a Sawmill server to do any decent reports.

 

We are considering moving to Fortigate as we have had the FW's for years but never flexed anything on them.

 

I use Sophos UTM at home and it's a bit quirky..

 

TT