Barracuda CloudGen Firewall Reviews

The firewall is robust and performs well for us. The solution is fairly easy to maintain and monitor, check logs and updates, and do daily, weekly, and month-to-month maintenance. We've actually been very happy with the firewalls and also the support.

We have a whole lot more control over the level of protection. Most of my clients are simple manufacturers, and we use the solution to protect them from web bots. They do have an integrated firewall or integrated malware protection and antivirus protection on the firewall. They've solved a lot of service attacks and attacks from simple infection bots that we were experiencing beforehand. The solution has had no downtime since we installed it. As opposed to some other firewalls that tend to lock up occasionally, this solution has never locked up or had any issues. 

The only issues we've ever encountered have been during an update or a change, which were always solved immediately by me or through a simple call to support. The solution's monitoring and logs are very comprehensive, and I've been able to backtrace hacks. Their history logs are very easy to pull on their unit, and they keep tons of data that is way more than I would ever need as far as that point. I have one client to whom we have provided a higher level of protection. Certain machines based on IP or MAC addresses cannot access the Internet. So that took a little bit of advanced configuration to get that going. The solution has phenomenally helped that business to block internet access for certain IP addresses or MAC addresses and yet allow the antivirus and Windows updates to occur. So the solution is good enough for a simple firewall, but they're also advanced enough to do some interesting things depending on your needs.

The stability of the client-to-site VPN or the client VPN software has been excellent. The antivirus protection or malware protection has been great. I love the level of logging with it because it makes running my quarterly reports and things for our ISO certifications a lot easier for us.

The biggest downside is that it is quite an expensive product. So a little bit better pricing or some options for a little bit cheaper device would be nice. They are quite complex to get up and running for anything beyond a basic installation. They could do something better with their initial setup wizard to make things just a little bit easier. Besides that, they're pretty good as far as I'm concerned.

I've been using the Barracuda CloudGen Firewall for a little over four to five years.

I rate Barracuda CloudGen Firewall a ten out of ten for stability because their stability has been excellent.

The solution is very scalable because you can use it for a simple setup or some quite advanced features. I rate Barracuda CloudGen Firewall a nine out of ten for scalability.

Their customer support has exceeded my expectations for every interaction we've ever had. I initially called them to ask how to set up the solution, and the guy walked me right through it. He was extremely knowledgeable, and he knew his stuff. Their customer support is available anytime, and it's quite easy to get a hold of them. Their process is a little strange. You have to get a call in and give them your info, and they log a ticket. After that, they get a tech to either work with you or they will call you back if their wait times are longer. Other than that, their support has been superb.

I rate their customer support a ten out of ten because they've been fantastic.

Positive

We used NETGEAR ProSAFE models. I also have quite a good experience with the D-Link AC line. Those were the two solutions that we were primarily using before the Barracuda CloudGen Firewall.

We decided to go with the Barracuda CloudGen Firewall because we wanted something more comprehensive and more powerful with better protection. The NETGEAR model is a thing of the past, and they're no longer selling those. The D-Links are still available, but they're nowhere near the protection and features that Barracuda CloudGen Firewall provides. So we were looking for a better product for small to medium-sized businesses, especially with all the hacking and everything coming out of other countries.

The initial setup is complex. I rate their initial setup a six or seven out of ten.

Setting up the solution with the company usually takes an hour and a half. Our most advanced case took about three hours.

I've always implemented the solution in-house or in-house with help from support. Typically, just one person is involved in the deployment of the solution.

There is minimal upkeep and maintenance on the device. You can configure it, set it up, and pretty much never touch it again if you wish. You may need to do the periodic updates they release that improve its features and protection. Once it's set up and configured, you can almost walk away from it until the device quits working. So far, we've only had one actual failure, and it was due to power issues. So, they've been rock solid, and you could configure it and walk away and not have any real maintenance if you wish. Or you can maintain it and keep it functioning at the top level.

I rate Barracuda CloudGen Firewall an eight out of ten for its pricing. It's not the most expensive, but it's certainly not cheap. It costs around $2000 a year for licensing, instant replacement, antivirus, virus or malware protection, and the general support contract we use. I am not aware of any additional costs to the standard licensing fee we pay for this solution.

We have not had any major technical problems. If we do ever have technical issues, their support has been extremely helpful. It is quite a complicated piece of hardware to configure, and I would love to find better training for that. However, someone with a technical background can set them up. We usually do the hardware replacement through their system every four years. They will send you a new device so long as you have kept the hardware replacement and the support up during the four years. So that's been an incredible plus to the unit itself.

I recommend having a talented or knowledgeable IT staff install it or be prepared to call support and spend time with them to get it installed. It's not simple by any means. Beyond that, be prepared to have a little bit of downtime while you're doing the installation. It's not a quick install. It's not something you can put in and have the network up in a few minutes, and it will take you a little while. And also, you need somebody that's either quite knowledgeable about it or is willing to work with their support team to set up the solution.

Typically, the deployment model used is on-premises or an on-premise and hybrid setup.

Overall, I rate Barracuda CloudGen Firewall an eight out of ten because my overall experience with the solution has been good.

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.

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.

The solution is deployed on premises.

The ability to be deployed and supported remotely is valuable. They also have a feature called instant hardware replacement.

Essentially, if you subscribe to a service, they replace the whole system in about four years, including the hardware. So, you have a new and upgraded one. Since there is a technology refresh, you don't have to consider replacing it or acquiring a new one.

The price could be better. The problem is that the network security landscape is very dynamic. New threats come in daily, and new approaches must be made. However, we haven't encountered anything Barracuda CloudGen Firewall couldn't handle so far.

We have been using this solution for several years.

Based on our experience, we find it very stable. We can set it up and forget about it. However, there are a few instances where we had to add capabilities and we did not have any problems.

The solution is scalable, but if you acquire it for a specific size or capability and exceed that capability, you need to acquire a new solution. You don't have to do a forklift upgrade, and you can add the capability. Essentially, they work together to provide a higher capacity and add solutions, but it's not elegant because you have multiple hardware platforms.

 The customer service and support team is very supportive.

Positive

The setup is a bit complex. However, if you have the required skill set, it is easy. Unfortunately, in our experience, we didn't have the skill set the first time we did it, so it took us a while. The Philippine distributor was also not well-versed with the solution when we had our first implementation. Now that we developed the skillset, setting up is not that difficult.

I rate the price seven out of ten.

We do not have the experience of comparing it with another NG firewall. However, we can compare it with the traditional hardware-based firewall. I think Barracuda is more flexible because of how it is designed, with the capability to add features. So it is very flexible.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. I would recommend Barracuda CloudGen Firewall to almost everybody, and I couldn't foresee anyone to whom I wouldn't recommend unless they are very price sensitive.

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. 

Our primary use case is the need for a VPN site to site connectivity across 30 or more sites. We employ the URL filtering, antivirus protection, malware, advanced threat protection, application control and identity fire walling. We're a customer of Barracuda and I'm a system administrator. 

I like the identity fire walling, malware protection and application control features. Those features provide us with the ability to give individuals or groups of users specific application access with the confidence that you have malware protection.

The solution could be improved with visibility into the traffic about what's happening at a given time. I think the analytics are weak and although it appears to be doing its job, it's difficult to know exactly what it's doing. 

I would like to see complete, real time and historical playback of all traffic and the amount of bandwidth utilized by each network.

I've been using this solution for three years. 

It's scalable but it's worthwhile scaling up physically before you need it. It means you basically have to overestimate the size of the appliance you're going to need. There isn't any trade up as you go kind of plan. If you think you're going to need more horsepower, you need to plan for that in advance so you're buying up more than you'll end up using. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

I think the technical support is very good, I haven't had any problems with them. 

The initial setup was a little complicated and it required an implementation strategy. You need to plan your VPNs and fail-over capabilities, the method or the order in which you build in your additional network settings is very critical. If you don't do it in the right order, nothing works and you have to restart the box which nobody wants to do. 

The licensing cost varies according to the size of the box. The 600 series is about $USD 10,000 a year and the 80 is $400 a year. There's a big difference.

If you're going to need advanced visibility into new areas, then you should plan on purchasing a third party product to be able to capture everything and you will then need to build that cost in. If you don't do that, you're just not going to have that visibility.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.