Smoothwall - Renew or replace?

[DrCheese]

Just to add my experience to the list:

 

We have been with Smoothwall for the last 8 years, at each renewal we have seriously considered Sophos and have come very close to going with them on one occasion. One of the major things when it came to the last renewal (when we were in lockdown), was shortcomings of Sophos for off-site filtering, at the time it was just a simple allow / deny list, this may have changed since but as we were looking at offsite filtering for over 100 devices at the time it was a big factor. Smoothwall on the other hand, allowed us to replicate our in school policies, regardless of location, without much effort at all.

 

Yes the smoothwall cloud feature is a massive tickbox for staying with them. I don't care at all now about students taking devices home because all setups are covered (Chrome/Windows/iOS)

 

Reporting tho is still.. meh unless you pay for the cloud reporting.

[Wave9_Lee]

Offsite filtering is available through Sophos Central Intercept X Advanced, and Integration with Central is in the roadmap for 2023 - ie synchronised with the firewall.

[mdrabble]

I was digging though the last renewal quote and realised that we got 6 months extra when we renewed last time, so it means I have a bit more time to look at this in the new year as renewal now due in June.

[ITGuyNW]

Well ours is up in May 24, what choice did you make @mdrabble ?

[MartinT]

We upgraded from our old Smoothwall S8 box to a new S9 in 2022. I can say that it very easily copes with upwards of 1,300 users all hammering a 1Gbps line with proxy, https inspection, AD accounting and content modification without problems. It's also pretty stable only receiving a reboot maybe once a term. The winner for Smoothwall is the safeguarding reporting, now a requirement in KCSIE, which is the best of any content management system I know.

[mdrabble]

I renewed for an additional 12 months to give me more time to evaluate other products especially with the new KCSIE updates.