KerioControl Reviews

I use it as a service for my customers. My primary target is to help my customers in the best way to protect them from the dangerous things from the Internet. As a solution, it's easy to maintain. The product is a good solver that also depends on good support and its availability of engineers.

I am using the latest version of Kerio Control. It is an old type of configuration with VPN connections. I still like the product very much.

It is mostly installed on the Linux software appliance. That's what I mostly use for my customers.

Most customers are not able to understand the technology behind it. I am always trying to explain it to my customers. When I show my customers the interface of Kerio Control and all the reporting features along with the security features within the logging, they're very impressed. I have a very good relationship with my customers because this is mostly based on trust. I show them, and if they have doubts, I always say, "Just hire somebody to check my work." For example, a year and half ago in the travel industry, there were new rules for travel agencies who give out credit cards that they must comply with PCI DSS standards. There were some things that had to be adjusted and Kerio was able to adjust for that. So, it met the demands of PCI DSS standards.

When one of the employees of my customers was using a VPN Client, I created it so they will always get a message. When the VPN Client connects to Kerio Control from the outside, they will get an email so they know when they are connected and when they are disconnected what is happening to their network. I can, as an administrator, look in the logging and see what's happening. If I really wanted to manage what is happening over a month, then I could go deeply within Kerio Control and make a text file of the logging. I could then order an export to Excel to give the customer an impression of what is happening.

Our customers don't want to worry about their IP. If it's implemented well, Kerio Control is very good product for this.

• Security
• Ease of use
• Ease of install
• Ease to recover
• The load balancing is very easy to maintain.

The login appearances are very strong. In case of problems, you're able to find anything you want. I am always able to help my customers. I really love this product. It's very good. With its many features, there is no comparison. Over the years, I have seen other types of firewalls but they don't have these functionalities within them. 

You can create your users, groups, IP addresses, IP groups, and make rules. It can do protocol inspection and load balancing. You can have a backup line where all kinds of scenarios are possible. 

It has security features, like an open source Internet protection system. This is well-known and a good solution to protect you from guys who try to hack systems. They have also integrated a fire scanner, a protocol inspection, and web content filter. You can adjust things depending on the types of organizations who are using it. Over the years, it has been very easy to maintain. 

I haven't seen anything else that compares to the comprehensiveness of its security features because I'm working mostly with small to mid-range offices. Manageability is very important, and that is possible with it.

Kerio Control's firewall and intrusion detection system, Snort, uses tables that are available on the Internet and loads them automatically. Over the years, I never had problems with my customers. The stability is very important for the product. I use Kerio Control as a central security system for my customers. On the workstation, I mostly use a virus scan. There are also multiple virus detections through your firewall. 

The VPN Client for users is a strong feature within Kerio Control. An important thing within the VPN Client is it also has the possibility for two-factor authentication, which I really like. For some customers, this is very important.

I like its malware features.

This is a very robust the product.

With Kerio Connect, they blew it. They were not able to pace up with the competition. I am working with a variety of customers: lawyer offices, travel agencies, big shopping mall accounts, and small accountancy offices. They have all kinds of needs. Kerio Connect did a new launch in the Netherlands for the ACG and GDPR, which are very strict for some companies, like lawyer offices. It is important within the mail server product that you're able to encrypt your attachments and have two-factor authentication. All these type of things are not within Kerio Connect. Therefore, this product is not interesting anymore for my customers since the Dutch law is that strict. For example, there was a judgment from a judge this year when a company was hacked. There was a guy who maintained this network gave some advice to the customer, but the customer would not pay for that solution. He was held responsible for about 60 percent loss of this business, because there was a ransomware within in the organization. These are the things we have to deal with in the Netherlands and in Europe. Within the Netherlands, this is a very important thing, so you can probably understand how important it is that the product is okay with the market demands.

After the takeover by GFI, one of the things that Kerio built was MyKerio environment. This is a cloud solution to have an overview of the statuses of all the firewalls that you maintain. When a firewall or primary interface goes down, then you get messages. It also has an app for iPhone or Android. You can then have a quick view about the status of the firewalls for your customers. If there is a problem with the Internet connection, whether it is down or there is an update, then you get a message. So, I can proactively help my customers. However, after the takeover, this has not been very reliable because I get many messages that MyKerio is not functioning. For some reason, there are things that they changed and it is not very reliable at this moment, instead I have to connect to the firewall to see what is happening.

MyKerio is a cloud thing where you can easily see all the firewalls that you maintain for your customers along with the statuses behind them, providing a way to securely connect to your firewall appliances. This is a very strong feature of MyKerio. However, nowadays, I'm not really impressed about things they do with it. That needs improvement in my opinion.

Another thing is that you must be a specialist, like me, when you want to have more specific information, e.g., when there are incidents or things that are happening that need investigation, then you need to go to the shell prompts and logging, where you can perform anything. You can edit anything out of your log files. However, this is not possible within the Kerio Control admin interface. You can only search for one thing, but not for many things.

Kerio Control has a very good future, but it needs good marketing and knowledge around it.

I have been working with it since the beginning (1997). When it started, it was called WinRoute. Now, the name is Kerio Control.

It is a very stable product, which over the years has been very good. 

The scalability is good. The VPN connections may need improvement. Because of all the security features within Kerio Control, e.g., it can do a deep packet inspection, this can slow down the traffic. Sometimes that creates a problem. For example, Kerio Control offers protocol inspection for the services that are available, and sometimes that gives problems because people are complaining that it is slow. The VPN connections from remote are not always very fast, so I think the throughputs of the VPN need improvement.

In every software, sometimes there are problems. One of the strong things about Kerio was the support knowledge and the involvement of the employees within the support department. I used to have the impression that the people working there were part of the products. It was almost a pleasure to have contact with people who were really involved with the products. After the take over of Kerio Control and Kerio Connect by GFI, it was really disastrous because a lot of the people involved were gone. When I had a problem and I asked for support, then they are asking me questions that I think help, but they don't understand the product. This is logical, of course, because there was a takeover.

The GFI product support for Kerio Connect has been unacceptable for my customers and me because I had major businesses that were running with this software and very satisfied because of the user-friendliness. Error and problems cannot be cured, but they must be solved. For example, when I perform an update, the next thing will be a ruined email system, but nobody will be available for support. This is also when they know that an update is coming and I am calling after updating it. They promise to support us, but there is no support, which is terrible. This is the thing that I feel is very important when you use business-critical software, and they need to improve on. I want to be able to call their support and reach someone who has knowledge about the product. 

It has a very sophisticated logging system. I need to be able to connect to the engineers behind it, who develop it, and tell them, "Okay, that's wrong." If I'm not able to connect to first level engineers and make them understand that they're not able to help me or they need deeper knowledge of the product, then there is a problem. While this is not an issue with Kerio Control because they have proven with the product that they are able to maintain it, the major problem for me with Kerio Connect was they ruined things in the past and I was unable to go back. So, I'm very interested in how they are improving the support to make things work again with MyKerio, as it is very good feature.

I have worked with all the firewall systems, like Cisco. I see how people struggle of with it and also how much effort it takes to maintain it and implement rules. Kerio did a very good job with that. You can also, in a quick way, see inbound and outbound traffic and make your own filters.

A basic initial setup is very simple and straightforward. They offer a straightforward set of rules to make it work, then you can create all the rules you need for the customer depending on their demands. It can do almost anything.

The deployment time frame varies. For example, if I am deploying to a shopping mall, that shopping mall has all kinds of offices. Every office has its own demands regarding the IP system that they use. Every shop has its own software supply and concepts. Sometimes things get complex, then I start from scratch to make sure everything is maintainable, but this is very easy in Kerio Control if you know how to do your job.

Because of the coronavirus, for people who want to work at home, it is very easy to set up VPN Clients because that is a piece of cake.

When you look at Kerio Control, they are able to maintain it in a way that I had no problems because I was always careful with updates. I first test them on-premise before I roll it out to my customers. That's also no guarantee, but we are able to maintain it in a good way.

Implementation strategy changes per customer. Some customers have very strict policies about the sites that they can access via the Internet. Others have limited bandwidth. For example, I had a customer who could not visit some Internet sites because most of my customers have two Internet connections. I found out that connecting through the other interface wasn't a problem. It had to do this with the networks between them. It's very easy in Kerio Control to make another path where another Internet connection is used for that website.

I built a large network of freelancers over the years in the Netherlands and foreign countries to get the best solution for each customers. I am working with all types of people who are trustworthy and have good knowledge of the product. I tell my customers, "The IT world is the same as the medical world. You don't go to a heart specialist for an eye operation, and you don't go to your normal doctor for a heart operation. They're all specialists on their specific terrain." That is the way I operate for my customers.

I handle the deployment and maintenance of Kerio Control myself.

I have seen ROI over the years. It is part of the complete solution that I offer to my customers. Over the years, it has offered me a reliable platform for my customer and allowing me to build trust with my customers. That's the most important thing of Kerio Control.

If the support is not good, then I have a problem with my customers and it will cost me money. That's one of the things that GFI did after the takeover: It cost me a lot of money. Because there were a lot of problems, not with Kerio Control, but with Kerio Connect. It really cost me with unsatisfied customers.

It's not a very expensive solution from my point of view. Because it is not only about buying a product, but how much time does it cost to implement the features that the product offers? I haven't found another product that is able to do the things that Kerio Control can do for the money. 

It is a good fit for SMBs because of its maintainability. When you want to keep your costs low, then Kerio Control is a very good solution. It's not an expensive product that is well integrated. It has a complete set of features within it that make it a very strong product.

GFI has made a stupid decision regarding small office licensing. For offices where there are only three to five employees and had five years towards a five user product, they now force these customers to a 10-year user license. I really don't understand it. It's a stupid decision for the small offices who want a good solution for security because they'll probably decide to go to another product. Why should they buy something that they don't use?

I don't use the Kerio hardware because they're too expensive and difficult to maintain.

Kerio Control has the ability if you buy it (it's a separate option) to know malware sites. Then, they will be blocked and the user is informed.

I have used Cisco, FortiGate, pfSense, and then more simple router things that have integrated software. However, mostly in business, I don't want to use just a router with integrated software. I don't believe in that concept. My customers are of a size that the stability of the product and the way it is maintained are very important to me. That's one of the strongest things about Kerio Control. It has proven to me over the years, and with my customers as well, that it's a very stable product. I haven't seen another product that compares to it within its price range. However, I also have to help my customers when they are having problems when connecting to a site or when they are having problems in general. When I contact their IT to find out what's happening on their side, it is difficult to get an answer why things are going wrong.

I can't find a comparable product to Kerio Control that offers the same set of features for the same money.

I found another product that can do a lot more than Kerio Connect, and that's IceWarp. IceWarp is a very strong product. IceWarp is a really strong competitor within this market. I was impressed with the software's ease of use because it's completely web-based. It's not only a mail server product, which offers secure attachments with out-of-the-box Office, but offers two-factor authentication. It also has a web-based text editor and Excel sheet, where you can make a basic presentation. With the same interface, there is the possibility to do OneDrive or Google Drive. They built it with the same depth that you need to log in to your IceWarp environment as a user. You can store your documents and sync them with a Mac or Windows PC. However, there is not much to find about this product.

Kerio Control is very good. The way that you can maintain it, it's very easy. I had an employee who built a copy of the product, which was a very basic interface for the open source community. You can find it on the Internet. He was impressed by the way Kerio built this firewall solver, because most firewalls are very difficult to maintain due to their complexity. If you are working in complex environments, it is not easy to maintain firewalls, because things are always changing. This is the part of Kerio that is very good.

Every IT guy that I show the interface of Kerio Control is impressed with the product because it's very easy to view how things are working (when you know what you're doing).

Ransomware is protected only when the system is able to detect, "Okay, this is coming from a link and that link is known, and it is within the protection."

I don't use the solution’s high-availability/failover protection because the hardware is needed as well and I wasn't able to test it. I want to test it first, because it's not only the testing, but what are the costs of ownership for the customer? Over the years, the Internet connections in the Netherlands are very stable. I always tell my customers that if they have an Internet connection that they should have a backup connection. The hardware that I use is mostly recent, stable hardware. So, it's not for my type of customers. This is not a very important feature because the hardware is well-maintained. However, that's a thing that I take care of since most hardware fails because there is not a good cooling environment or a lot of dust is in hardware. I make sure that things are running well as part of my services.

I'm still surprised that sometimes I need something which I thought was not within Kerio Control, and it was within Kerio Control. That's mostly the case.

Biggest lesson learnt: Stick with suppliers for software products who are able to give very good support.

I would rate the product as a nine (out of 10). It is very good.

Our biggest customer uses Kerio Control as a VPN on a campus network that we use to encrypt all of their heating and air. It's at the University of Mexico. It controls all of their heating, air, and security over their campus network. I have a hundred units doing that.

I'm a one-person team, and Kerio Control has saved me time. When I looked at the comparison between how much time I spend supporting a business installation of Kerio versus a FortiGate installation, just with the implementation, I have saved a few weeks of time. On a yearly basis, I have saved around 30 to 40 hours on one customer because they're bigger customers.

The VPN is the most valuable feature. We filter out outgoing NAT packets by port. So we locked down incoming and outgoing packets with the Kerio software. It's a lot less money than our FortiGate solutions that we installed, for instance. The value in it is money savings and flexibility.

Kerio is a lot clearer to set up to do particular things, whereas when I do it on a Cisco or a FortiGate I have to go fight with it per week sometimes to do something I can do in 20 minutes on Kerio.

For the money, the comprehensiveness of the security feature is exceptional. The next level of security is the sandbox and FortiGate charges me $120,000 a year for that sandbox. I don't see that as something that Kerio would ever be adding. The next step is a big, drastic step up in company size. So for medium and small businesses, I think Kerio is about as good as I can get.

It gives us everything we need in one product for our small-size business.

For medium to small businesses, the firewall and intrusion detection features are very well priced and just excellent. The functionality for the amount that we're paying for them is excellent.

The malware and antivirus features are okay. I add stuff on top of Kerio, I have Malwarebytes. So I would give it an okay. Malwarebytes still catches quite a bit that Kerio doesn't.

I used the content filtering a little bit and it works alright. I've got a hundred VPNs at the University of New Mexico. I don't put it anywhere else though, so I don't know. I don't really have any kind of input on that, I suppose.

Their graphical user interface that allows me to open up particular ports to particular internal IPs with one external IP is very flexible and easy to use. It is also much clearer than when I go into my larger systems with two competitors, Cisco and FortiGate.

Kerio enables me to use one external IP address to cut it into multiples server solutions based on different port numbers. It saves them money if my customers are creative enough to use those features.

The overall speed needs improvement. Internet connectivity speed needs to be improved somehow.

If I buy one of Kerio's hardware boxes and put it between me and the Internet, the speed is reduced dramatically using their hardware.

I have been using Kerio Control for the last twenty years. 

We currently have one on Macintosh and one on Windows of the most current version of Kerio Control as well as Kerio Connect.

I found it to be fairly stable. Their updates have gone very smoothly, which is a nice thing. It doesn't crash during updates. I've had very good luck with that. Whereas I can't say the same thing with both Cisco and FortiGate.

If you buy their hardware box, it doesn't scale so nicely. I found if I put it on a higher-end computer, it does better. I guess it's okay if you put the right hardware in for it. I can't get through those to their boxes.

I had some customers that were running about 200 to 300 machines, those were my larger ones with Kerio. For the most part, I have them on between five and 20 users.

One of my customers had some issues that weren't pleasant. Support was pretty good and then it changed quite a bit when Lifeboat and GFI were involved. I personally haven't done too bad. I'm a one-person show, but I have a bunch of subcontractors. I personally have done alright with them. Although some of my people have had some not as good experiences over the last six months. They had time-related issues, about how long it took them to get back to them.

On average, it takes around one to two hours on a small to medium business to set it up. But it's totally dependent on their applications and that can vary up to quite a few hours if they've got some complex application issues. Typically, it's because I have to wait on getting responses from vendors. So we go out and we put in a default setup and modify off of that.

Our default setup pretty much locks their network up to only having HTTP, it turns off FTP and things of that nature. We have a pretty secure default setup and then we go open things.

After you've done it a few times it's pretty smooth.

Our ROI is money savings. We bill them every year for their renewal subscriptions, and that goes fairly smoothly. We don't have to spend a whole lot of time trying to figure out how to add a particular port or interface for a new function that the client needs to have access to. They never need the Internet. It takes us considerably less time to do it on Kerio than it does on the competing products that we also deal with. Which, from our perspective, is appropriate. For some people, it would be a mixed blessing because you are not getting as much billable time out of it, but we like to be as efficient as possible and so we appreciate that. We feel it's a good return on investment.

I think that licensing flows pretty smoothly. Make sure that you set them up so you support them over the my.kerio.com web interface because that lets you see all of your customers.

We don't use high availability or fail-over protection. We set one up once and almost gave up on it. You have to have pinnacle boxes and things, so we did set it up and test it but we haven't actually sold any of them.

I feel pretty comfortable having a Kerio firewall in a medium to small business. It can be deployed in an easy fashion, which is the same as everybody's Comcast, CenturyLink, or whatever their modem has. Then if you really spend the time doing it correctly, you can give somebody what, I feel, is an enterprise-quality solution in small business for a good price.

If I pinhole Kerio for small businesses, I would rate it a 10 out of ten but overall, I would give it a seven.

It's the Edge firewall for my business. I'm a small business IT consultancy and I'm subcontracted out to a larger organization. It's really just me working from home, which is a bit more permanent now, but we do have a couple of other side projects I work on with a couple of other partners. One of them is a financial trading solution, so we want Kerio to beef up the edge security to make sure that the solution itself was secured nicely because it meant building out a rack of a couple of rack-mounted servers and beefing up the solution. 

Being an SMB, we do find that Kerio fits our needs. It fits nicely in that space because any time that I've been to an enterprise it's pretty much dominated by Cisco products. A product like this probably wouldn't get much air time to get in the door of a really big organization, whereas a small to medium-size enterprise where they're big enough to have some sort of IT presence, it would probably fit in nicely. With an enterprise that's my size that doesn't have an IT presence, then they'll probably use some sort of managed service solution.

We wanted to beef up the firewall and not just run off some sort of IoT style firewall that's built into a modem. It didn't seem to be adequate for our needs. So that's where we went into Kerio because at the time, we had some remote desktop services running and we were getting a lot of attempted cyber attacks coming out of China and a few other places. Kerio was one of the few that could actually geo-block, which was really quite handy.

Its primary job is to protect us and give us a degree of comfort. We're putting a lot of effort into creating a financial trading system. We want some comfort that it's secure behind the quality firewall and that's really what beckoned its purchase. The fact that we've not had any issue indicates that it must be doing that job reasonably well, and the fact that we don't get any of those attempted attacks from the block in China, because of geo-blocking, is probably the strongest feature for us. I wouldn't say it improves what we do because it doesn't affect what we do. It's really just security.  It's a tool to improve our security profile for what we do.

We don't expose our remote desktop connected servers to the internet anymore. But when we did have that, because the security log is a really easy thing to set up, it would show you all the attempted, brute force attacks. That's now down to zero. We don't get any brute force attacks, but at the same time, we don't expose the Port 3389 out to the internet. We could achieve the same result with a domestic firewall in a domestic router. However, this gives us a degree of comfort that we can actually analyze any traffic that looks a bit suspicious, inbound, or outbound. That's a definite step change compared to what we'd have in an out-of-the-box type of router.

Security is there to slow things down and make things a bit tricky. That's its bottom line. If security is easy, it's probably being done wrong.

Certainly in the first few months of using it, it was quite time-consuming to get a configuration working that was reliable. Because I work from home, I originally had it protecting everything coming in and out of the home which didn't work well at all. It's protecting the home office and the server environment. Everything else just goes straight out of the domestic router out to the internet because we've got IPTV, with kids on devices. They don't need such a high level of protection. It would be nice to give them that because if you've got this perimeter that's protected by a really good quality product, you want to protect everything.  But when we tried that, it seemed to struggle with the high volume of traffic that was being generated by the IP cameras, the IPTV service, and the myriad of devices and iPads that we have in the house. So we stopped using it for that purpose.

The top features are ones that we're not using yet but we soon will be because we've just had broadband upgraded in Australia. We've got something called the National Broadband Network, which is forced onto you, so you have to take it when it arrives. We'll be trying the high availability out soon. We tried that with some load balancing, it didn't quite work as we expected, but I think that was more of a configuration thing rather than a product thing.

The geo-blocking is essential because the partners we deal with are typically either in the US or Australia. We know where our traffic needs to come from and we don't post anything publicly that the general world needs to see. It's just a few discreet services that need to be hosted on this financial trading stuff.

The integration of Active Directory is very good as well. We don't use the VPN service. We use VNC. We get mixed results from the QoS, but that's another good feature. Really, dashboarding, track, and monitoring are the most important features for us as well.

We are about to test the high availability and failover protection because one of the issues we have is the device or the Hyper-V host seems to need a regular rebooting, which isn't an issue directly in itself, but it would be nice if it could do that on its own. We can't find a feature to do that. That's the complaint I'd have of that and the HA might solve that problem for us. So we'll give that a go.

Out-of-the-box, the overall comprehensiveness of the security features is pretty good. It's not just a firewall, it's kind of a firewall proxy, reverse proxy, everything out-of-the-box sort of solution. It's pretty comprehensive. I can't imagine wanting anything else, because for me as a consultant, it's not just about protecting the environment. It's also about having something that's commercial-grade because when you go in as a consultant, you need to be exposed to these tools and you need a lab environment to test these tools out. This is as close to a good commercial tool that you could possibly ask for.

In terms of the availability issue, I've considered that there are hardware options as well, which is nice. We're not sure if that will be an improvement over using Hyper-V, but that's to be decided.

The antivirus seemed to be a bit laggy on the connection so I disconnected that. It's definitely good. The only issue we've had with any sort of cyber attack seemed to be coming from a couple of distinct locations, people trying to get into known ports on remote desktops and stuff like that. The fact that we can block all that traffic is just great. It simplifies it.

The last time we used the antivirus, it seemed to slow down some of the connections. I didn't dig too deep into it, we just turned it off and it seemed to rectify the problems. It's hard to say whether it was that directly but it seemed to be creating a bit of overhead on the connections.

The reliability is its biggest downfall. I don't expect to be rebooting a product like this every couple of days. In fact, it's become a start of day thing just to reboot so it doesn't let me down in the middle of a team's call or something like that. It's quite slow as well. I could be on a team call and it would drop the connection. Then we'll get a warning that we've got poor call quality and as soon as you restart the device all the problems go away. There's clearly maybe some sort of memory leak problem or something in there that's affecting its reliability.

We've just had our national broadband network connection today, which is a high throughput connection. We will be reconnecting the entire household through the device, to see how it copes and we'll see if it improves anything.

I have been using Kerio Control for two and a half years. 

If I came across a client that was a small to medium enterprise, I'd probably recommend it, but a lot of them have a solution in place now anyway. It's hard to get those opportunities for new business in that regard, but I reckon it would probably scale quite well. I'm at 25 licenses, but that's only because we have so many devices in this house. It looks like it probably would scale. As I said, with that level of reliability, that probably would be an issue if you wanted to scale 100 to 200 licenses.

We did try the proxy feature, but once again, that failed miserably. It ran well for a few weeks and then it died on us, and it was really quite hard to diagnose what had gone wrong. We turned it off and went back to a previous configuration which was a bit disappointing. It comes back to that reliability, whatever it is that makes it conk out is clearly a problem.

I used support once or twice when I hit the first license ceiling. I did log a support ticket in. They were fine. There were no complaints from that. They offer 24/7 support, via email. I don't think I actually phoned them up. It's pretty good. There are no real issues there.

We tried a few different Windows-based products. That's how we found Kerio because it offered a Hyper-V solution and it also offered a hardware solution if you wanted. I'll try the software one first and see where we go. There were a couple of other products we used before. Originally, we used to use Microsoft, the ISA server back in the day because that got swallowed up by Fortinet and we didn't touch that. 

There was another Windows product, WinGate. That has a really bad reliability problem. It would stay up but the connections were very slow going through that thing. Maybe it was poorly configured on my part, but it just seemed to be incredibly slow at managing the connections. We'd notice a very latent response from web pages and it never, even though it had a massive caching there for caching pages, it just seemed to never be as quick as bypassing the WinGate software. That wasn't virtualized. That was running on a native Windows server at the time so that was really quite poor in terms of performance.

Given that it's a Linux deployment, the support it offered, like giving you a Hyper-V client out-of-the-box, is fantastic. It's a really clever idea because you're not then left with a painful configuration of spinning up some sort of Linux host and then trying to do an installation. The fact that it comes pre-packaged with Hyper-V images was a very smart and clever move because that made it a lot easier to get it going if you like. Getting that up and running was quick, it was just a configuration, and finding the right configuration was the hardest part.

The deployment was less than half an hour. It was very quick to get it up and running and get it operational. It was just fine-tuning that configuration to suit my environment that took the time, which I would expect of any device, no device is going to come out-of-the-box and just work like magic unless you've got a really simple environment. Whereas I've got a home environment, where it's just me as a small business, but I've got that many servers and hosts running.

Our strategy was to take it out-of-the-box and get it working.

The setup was pretty easy. The external remote control was really good and simple. It gave extra manageability on the road which was good. It was pretty straightforward.

In terms of maintenance, it's just me. In terms of my time, it doesn't take much time at all. I'll hardly make any changes to it. Now it's running fine. The only next thing I'll be doing is trying out the HOA.

With security, I don't think you can calculate ROI. It's not easy to call a return on investment with security products because anything security that's done properly is going to be a cost overhead. That's by its very nature. If security is quick or cheap it's probably wrong. I don't look at it as a return on investment, I see it as security. A bit like saying if I bought a new car and they said, "I can save you $500 if you say no to the airbags." For 99.9% of the time, you'd be saving $500, until one day it costs you lots of money and maybe your life. I see it the same way.

It's not an optional extra, it is an overhead that you have to pay if you want to secure an important asset. You've got to weigh up how important that asset is against how well you want to secure it, and that's where you say, "Well, it's going to cost you the price of a Kerio license, the price of a VNC license, sort of remote management. And that's what it costs to manage and secure properly those services." I'd say we've achieved that. It's hard to really put a return on investment with security.

I think it is a bit on the pricey side, but it's okay. I've got 50 licenses which I think is $250 a year or something like that. It's not terrible. It's actually cheaper than what we pay for VNC. We probably could save money thereby utilizing the Kerio VPN and not VNC. For a firewall proxy solution, it's probably a bit on the higher side price-wise.

We have to provide our own Hyper-V host to spin it up or buy the Kerio hardware, but otherwise, there are no other costs.

I'm experienced in networking, but I'm not a network engineer per se, I'm more software development. The fact that I was able to get it set up and going with minimal fuss was definitely a plus for the product. I've seen products before where you can get them running, you make the slightest configuration change, and the whole thing comes crashing down. It's quite a stable product in that respect and it does look after itself quite well. For example, risk proxying solution and buying a GoDaddy certificate to secure a couple of APIs was a piece of cake. It really didn't hurt us at all. I think the important lesson there is, if we had tried to do the same thing with a NETGEAR sort of a firewall with a built-in firewall product, I think we would have had a hard time. Kerio definitely has made it easier.

I'd say give it a look for sure. I'd totally recommend it.

I would rate Kerio Control a seven out of ten. If I didn't have to reboot it so often, then it would probably score a nine.

It's not a cheap product and it's not a particularly reliable product at the same time which tends not to be a good mix. Something like this should be able to cope with my entire household, every device I throw at it, and it should be able to cope with that fine. It clearly didn't two years ago. We'll try it again in about 24 hours and we have to hook up this high-speed connection to it and we'll see how well it performs there. Reliability is about the only qualm I have with the product.

We have over 50 office staff that we use Kerio Control to protect, monitor web traffic, and cloud-host environments. We have a VPN tunnel from outside vendors that we keep connected to our environment and we use it as a switching device between some of our hardware in the hosting environment. We also use it for the security function. 

Our primary use case is for intrusion prevention from attackers, from wherever they may be. And also for doing the quality of service because we have a lot of remote users, especially during this pandemic. We can control the quality of service with phones and network devices, as well as the antivirus scanning. We use the whole gamut of pretty much everything that Kerio has to offer.

We're still a small company but we are pushing what the software is currently able to handle, while it seems to be geared towards small-medium business.

Content filtering used to be that you had to block specific websites that you didn't want somebody to access, or you had to write a specific rule to say that something is accessible or not accessible. We can apply Kerio-provided categories and rules without having to define large scopes of protocols or malicious websites. That part of it has come a long way in the last five to ten years.

The GUI is the best part of the product. If another team member needs to get in there to do something, it's a really quick click and it's done. There's no learning through command-line tools.

On an annual basis, we save not just hundreds of hours but also labor costs. Over the life of the product, I'm sure it's in the tens of thousands of hours because we don't need an inhouse specialist in Kerio technology.

The ease of use in the GUI itself is the most valuable feature. We like the traffic rules so we can control who has access. It's easy to determine the flow of the traffic itself so we don't have to educate on command lines and reading out command-driven output. It's a very easy-to-use interface.

The comprehensiveness of the security features is fairly good. There have been some suggestions that we've made to the GFI team that we would like to see for performance. As our company grows, we need Kerio to grow with us, and so we've suggested some ideas on making the Kerio Control appliance perform better for more users because it can become sluggish under heavy loads.

In terms of security features, Kerio gives us most of what we need. There are some granular items that we would find more useful when we want to stop a particular region from access. 

The firewall and intrusion detection features are really good, it just needs a little bit more fine-tuning.

The content filtering and VPN features are great. The vpn client is ssl based, so no key cipher matching is required when setting up without information in front of you.

The security part of the software, like virus scanning, website, traffic monitoring, things like that, can take a toll on performance. The actual security functionality of it needs a little bit more work, which I believe they are remedying or attempting to remedy at this time, but that's the downfall at this time; it is currently running on an end of life linux kernel.

I personally have been using Kerio Control for 13 years but it's been at my company for close to 20 years.

The stability has actually improved quite a bit. There were some bugs found in previous versions up until about last spring, and then they concentrated on fixing some of the issues causing us some problems. As of the last update, it's very stable.

It's not very scalable when you start to get into the hundreds to thousands of users because the performance of all of the functionality isn't quite there yet. We're hoping that's remedied with some updates coming down the line.

Kerio is pretty much the backbone of everything that we do. Keeping all of our customers connected to us, keeping our staff safe online, and getting our staff into our cloud environment.

The GFI technical support can be very time-consuming to get down to the root of the problem, but they are very helpful when you do have an issue. It just takes some time to get to it. It sometimes can be communication that's the issue. Sometimes it can be the complexity of the problem.

It doesn't seem to be a lack of knowledge on the technical support side of things. Some of it comes down to whether the product can currently do what we needed to do or not. We were trying to determine if there was something that we could do to get better performance out of the appliance, and the response from the GFI support team was that it wasn't able to do some of the things that we wanted it to do, but it was something that they were looking at with rewriting some of the functionality. There is the possibility that some of those can be overcome easier.

I did not have any experience with another similar solution. In fact, I had never heard of Kerio until I started at my company, primarily because Kerio was fairly small at the time. They were based out of California at the time. They were a small company and generally fit into the 100-users-or-less environment. When you would hear about other vendors, they generally ran in the thousands to tens of thousands of users and you just didn't hear about Kerio in that product line.

We take other solutions into consideration based on the growth needs that we have. As our cloud environment gets larger, if the Kerio technology is not able to keep up, that's always under consideration.

The process was pretty straightforward. Something that I expected to take days to weeks took about two or three hours.

Network security should not be planned around providing a return on your dollar in terms of a payback in the administration of the process. It should be planned around providing a level of comfort to management that intruders are being kept out of the network, errors and omissions are being kept to an acceptable level of risk.

Price-wise, it's very affordable. Whether you're a smaller or larger business, whether you're five users or a couple of hundred users, the pricing is very fair. The performance of it is what determines how you want to license it because you can purchase a Kerio appliance. We try to make use out of everything because we like to keep it in one place. It has fit our business size and needs.

Some of the main differences between the other solutions and Kerio is that Kerio has made their subscription service fairly universal. You get pretty much everything with one subscription. With some of the other vendors, you have to subscribe to each module that you want to use. On the other side of it, other firewall vendors tend to be able to handle in the millions of connections, hundreds of thousands to millions. And we see some of those limitations with the Kerio appliance because of some of the aging architecture of it.

My advice would be to follow the hardware requirements of Kerio and make sure the equipment that you have can run the connections for the number of users that you intend to run and are being planned out to be successful. Working with the Kerio team to determine your needs works out very well. 

Not all firewalls have to be difficult to learn. Kerio has made it a really easy-to-use product.

I use Kerio Control because it is one of the few firewalls which allows easy failover from two separate internet providers. It also has virus protection built-in. I use it to have reliable access to the internet, which is virus-free and which fails over if one of my internet providers drops — and they do sometimes when it rains. Those were the reasons I wanted Kerio Control. And it just works; provides internet.

We are a very small company, and started with two users. We have now four users who use it on and off. There are nine or 10 computers. I, myself have three or four computers working at the same time. I'm not really dependent on cloud, but I use internet very much in a lot of situations.

It's deployed onsite but as a virtual machine in a Windows server.

Being an SMB, Kerio Control is nice-to-have. It fulfills my needs completely. 

It allows the users I have to use email without any problem, without their having to know anything about the fact that there is a firewall which protects them in different ways. I might spend an hour per month on maintenance of the Kerio system. So it's very transparent and very hidden. The best thing is the fact that nobody notices it.

It has helped me save time. It allows me to get on with my main work, without spending any time on security or worrying about threats to the data I have. Without it, I would have lost a lot of time. A long time ago, I spent a lot of time cleaning computers, removing viruses, etc. That has all gone away since I have had this set up, as part of a three-layer defense.

The failover has no effect on security. It only affects the availability. There used to be a situation where I had two internet providers with different speeds. If my main provider was down, it would be backed up by the other and I wouldn't notice that it was a little slower, and I wouldn't notice that one of my internet providers was unavailable. This guarantees that I always have internet availability. We had some technical problems with one of the lines which was very sensitive to rain — which sounds weird, but okay. And this setup allowed me to not think about it anymore. Since then, internet speeds have grown and at the moment it's not a big issue, but I'm sure that both of the providers drop once a year for a day. But I don't notice it, and that's very important for me.

The most valuable features include 

• being able to attach to two different internet providers
• the ability to map which ports you will allow in and out of the VPN, which is built-in 
• the fact that it reliably works without any attention.

I want to have access to my computer from the outside and Kerio Control plays a role because it has a VPN. This VPN is different from most other VPNs, although they have used a standard version. It is more reliable because it's a smaller group of computers to target for hackers and the like. The VPN works very well. I use it to work remotely very easily and exchange information, both to and from the location where it's deployed, and there have been no problems there.

I have one or two VPN clients, at most, that are active at one time, so it's there if needed when I'm not working at this location. It helps me a lot to have a reliable VPN client. I have no performance issues when working through VPN.

Kerio Control also has some authorizations so I am able to block internet access for certain hours for certain people.

Overall, the security features are adequate. They do what I need. I don't have much experience with anything else, so I can't compare, but they completely solved my problems.

The firewall and intrusion detection features don't hinder me, and I haven't had any attacks, as far as I can see. I want a firewall to be unobtrusive. I don't want to notice it's there. It should just do its work and protect me and not hinder me when doing real work, and that's what it does. It's very good because it shouldn't be noticed, and it's good at not being noticed and doing its work.

Overall, I don't have any problem using Kerio Control. For me, it's very easy, but I've been working in software for some 50 years.

I would like to be able to automatically send email from Kerio Control and have it tell me what my external IPs are, because on one of my lines I have a fixed IP address and on the other it is variable. If there were a permanent way for me to figure out, "Okay, my current external VPN and my firm IP is this," it would help. I need to know the IP address to connect with the VPN and, at the moment, one of the lines sometimes changes its IP address without me knowing it. It's a hassle to figure out what it is.

It might also be interesting to have a GFI-approved, Docker-containerized version of the Kerio Control system.

I have been using Kerio Control for more than 10 years.

I don't remember any glitches. I haven't had problems with it for a very long time. But I use it very specifically for a certain purpose and that works fine.

It's very hard for me to give a correct estimate of the scalability, since a lot of overhead in my situation is caused by the fact that I run it in a virtual machine. That means the bandwidth which it can process, which would be scalable, is downgraded because it's in a virtual machine. That's not Kerio's fault.

I have no plans to increase the usage in the future. For me, it's adequate because I have a lot of leeway. I have enough bandwidth available to fulfill my needs.

The problems I've had with Kerio, when I wanted to change something, have always been solved by consulting the Knowledge Base.

We are located in Holland and there is supposed to be Dutch tech support, and there is an American tech support, as far as I know. The bad thing about the American tech support is that reaching them by phone is difficult and by mail there's a certain turnaround. So, I'd rather rely on the Knowledge Base so that I'm not really dependent on the person on the other side.

They have an extensive Knowledge Base and, if you can't find something there, you can check the internet and there's enough available.

I switched because I wanted something which had the possibility to handle two different internet providers, two network cards, and do load switching and load balancing. The other solution I used didn't have that.

The initial setup is easy. I know what I want to configure so it's easy, no problem at all. 

The biggest problem I have is using it as a container on a virtual machine. You have to connect your hardware network cards to the internal virtual machine. That's a problem that Kerio won't be able to solve because it's the environment I have to create to let Kerio work in the way I work, and that is probably different than most users. But if you use it on a simple PC, it's no problem at all.

I reinstalled it recently and it took me about half an hour, and part of that was getting backups right, etc.

As for an implementation strategy, I changed the system my Kerio was installed on, so I first did a trial-install to figure out if everything worked. After that, when I did the actual production install, it was done very fast because I had tried it out before.

It does its job. Converted into hours, it doesn't cost more than five hours per year to pay the price for the 10 users I have. That's a good deal for me.

Having good internet access is a very large requirement for me to do my work. Internet is one of the basic tools I have and I need a firewall. Your internet provider will give you a box that has a simple firewall in it, but that doesn't suffice for me. I need something like this and it's not an option for me not to buy a product like this. I'm really not even thinking of return on investment. If I don't have something like this, I just can't work. It's a basic necessity.

I don't think it's expensive. I'd recommend it to others.

I haven't evaluated any other options. I started using Kerio Control and it was sufficient. I haven't spent any time looking at alternatives. I've seen constant improvements in Kerio; they actively enhance the product. That's a good sign for me. I also use the GFI mail server and I prefer to use one company for my tools.

My general advice is always: Read the manual, check your hardware and see if you have everything you need, and if it will suit your needs.

It's hard for me to assess its malware and antivirus protection because Kerio is one part of a three-part defense against malware and antivirus. I'm not sure which part picks up which problem. My philosophy is that no single protocol picks up all the problems, so if you have several of them, you'll fight the virus or malware at some point. That's why I have three different tools with different focus points, and together they keep me safe. Malwarebytes specializes more in malware, ESET is a normal desktop antivirus system, and this system is a general anti-malware and antivirus system of another type. They compliment each other.

I have an internet speed of 200 megabits per second, and 15 might be enough. So the only point I don't know about Kerio is whether it takes a lot of performance out of the maximum you could get if you didn't have a firewall.

Overall, I would give it a nine out of ten, but with the comment that I haven't compared it with anything else. On my scale, 10s are very rare. They're for things that go beyond my expectations and Kerio does exactly what I expect and it does it well.

It's just an essential which does it's work. I don't think about it normally. It's just there and it works.

We use the tool for VPN and security. 

The tool shows what has been blocked externally. It's very good because once installed and correctly set up, it allows you to work from home as if you are in the office, without any errors or issues. It's very simple to use, click to connect or disconnect.

The solution pushes out updates every five to ten minutes to the cloud. 

I would like to see geo-IP filtering added to the filtering rules. Incorporating these rules would be very beneficial if you have different ideas or reasons to filter, such as communication to the email server or specific websites.

I have been working with the product for 15 years. 

I rate the tool's stability a nine out of ten.

My company is small and has 150 users. 

Support is free and is part of the license. We get support through the partners. They are quick and responsive. 

Neutral

I would rate the initial setup of KerioControl a nine out of ten. It's very easy because there are pre-deployed rules at the beginning. When you start KerioControl, you must input the password and base network settings. Some additional configuration is needed for specific environments, but overall, the setup is very fast. It takes 10-20 minutes to complete. 

KerioControl's pricing is reasonable. The license for KerioControl is annual. It's difficult to specify an exact cost since it varies depending on the number of users and additional software combined with it. For example, a basic box might cover 25 users, but licenses can be purchased starting from 10 users.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

My primary use case is to route traffic and route our multiple Internet interfaces. It routes all of the outbound Internet traffic, none of the internal. I do apply a content filter as well to make sure people aren't going into places that they shouldn't be. We have some traffic rules setup for certain services, blocking certain IP ranges from getting external access as well. We do the same for the Adelaide office, but our South Coast office, in addition to all of that, we also run DSCP off of it. The South Coast is the only place we use the DSCP on Kerio.

Now that we're both running fiber connections between Sydney and Adelaide, I can access our document server in Adelaide just from my PC, rather than using something like TeamViewer and transferring the file I'm after via TeamViewer from Adelaide. I get to it not much slower than the internal server we have right now. It's fantastic.

The routing of the multiple Internet physical routers I have is the most valuable feature of this solution. Instead of me physically unplugging a cable from one router to the server, if one connection goes down, it automatically switches for me. So I can have all three of them plugged in. If one goes down, it just picks up the other one automatically. There's no physical cable swapping.

In terms of ease of use, it's pretty easy. It took some playing around for me to understand some of it, but I'd say if you understand what it is you're after, and how that works, then this is pretty easy.

We use the firewall. It's fine, a bit tough. I need to test it against others. I'd rather use the Kerio firewall than the Windows ones.

With the VPN features we can connect all three of our sites together.

The content filtering and VPN features are pretty easy to set up. It's a couple of clicks and it's done, so it's pretty good. I'm pretty happy with it.

I am the only manager who manages the security. It does save me time. In the scenario where one Internet connection goes down, I used to have to run to the server room and unplug a cable, and come back. Now, I don't have to do that at all. It saves me a lot of time, 100%. With the routing, previous to this there are a few things in here that I haven't had the ability to really do how I wanted so I don't have a comparison.

I would like it if the interface section had multiple failovers. Although I do have three connections, just in case our physical cables get disconnected, I can only set up one failover as a backup. So, if for some reason our fiber and our AFM went down together, I would have to have it search for our 4G modem. I'd love to have extra backups running.

Someone set a printer to have a static IP address and because they set it as static, it won't show on my LAN, on the DSCP server, because it's not questioning it. So just because the device does not request the rules from the DSCP, I don't see why it wouldn't show up in my LAN on the DSCP server. That's a bit odd. It's different from how a Windows DSCP server would react. Instead of only showing one is requesting DSCP, or on a reservation, it shows all, whether they're reserved or not. A Windows one would. For some reason, it isn't showing me ones that were statically assigned.

I have been using Kerio Control for four to five years. 

It's deployed in three different locations now. 

The stability is pretty good. I've only had one issue with it before. It was set to update on its own, and it didn't update and the update failed, so it didn't come back on for some reason.

If an update fails, it should have some kind of automatic rollback to bring itself back on. Because when it does that at night and it stops, I don't really get a notification that it's stopped. It's not on anymore so I don't find out that nothing has worked all evening until the next morning.

Scalability is fantastic. I don't see a limit to it.

I am the only admin for this solution.  

We employ a company that contracts stuff out for me, so they're the people that initially installed this for me at the three sites, but I maintain it. If I have other things I don't know how to do, they'll get in, but it's just me and that other team.

Increasing usage depends on whether the business itself acquires other businesses, and that's really why we've got these three locations. We bought a business in Adelaide, so we set up a similar setup to what we had in Sydney. And this year in February we bought another business down in the South Coast of New South Wales and we've set up a similar thing there as well. So if we buy other businesses and I need some other help with the server running, then yes, I'll probably get another license. But only if that happens.

My business is medium-sized and this solution is perfect for it. 

I have one point of access for multiple portions of what I need for routing. We've got an Internal server that's managed by a different company and it was incredibly easy for that other company to put certain rules in place and then for us to create those rules to and communicate to the outside world was incredibly easy to map. There was just no confusion between the two companies that we're talking about what to map. That was in the initial setup, so that all wasn't done by me. They just communicated to each other very easily. This made it very simple. There was no confusion.

I've never contacted technical support because I just call the people that I contract to fix things and if they're not quite sure how to fix something, they'd probably contact GFI. 

We used to use a Cisco router. That was it. There was a very limited amount of routing I could really perform.

Kerio Control enables us to add multiple routing. We have lots of different options in the one thing. 

Kerio was recommended to me by ITIS. They told me that this one was what they highly recommended we use for what I needed.

The outsourced contractor that we used for the setup was great. There's nothing wrong. I've been using him for a while.

I can't imagine not using it. I think if I had to use the Microsoft server to do all of this I'd be very frustrated.

I don't have other ones to compare the pricing to. I haven't used other solutions to know all the features they have. The price seems reasonable to me for something that does so much and works so well.

Kerio Control has not increased the number of VPN clients but we have added clients only because they needed it, not because Kerio is there.

To the best of my knowledge, before Kerio we did not experience a security breach. The only semi security issue we had was that someone had run a virus that encrypted a whole bunch of files on the server. But that was before my time. I was not the IT manager at that point.

If I didn't have the help from someone else that completely understood all of the services that are features of this product, then I probably wouldn't have put it in myself. It's definitely more advanced for people that are handling this type of networking day to day, which I don't. The only other thing that I've had a problem with is Apple servers for some reason, because Apple services come through on so many different servers themselves, and different destinations on the Internet, there's always some kind of issue with updating them on the network with Kerio running. I don't know why. It's just Apple. Everything else is fine.

Personally, I've just learned how to route traffic over a network well. It's helped me to route different parts of the Internet to different parts of my network, which I can't do on a Window server, and visually it's been a great help.

It's been able to add multiple Interfaces, it's good. I have multiple Internet streams and a failover. That's the best.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

We mainly use Kerio Control for the phone systems. We use it like a VPN network so that I and a couple other guys can take our computers home and work from home. That's a great feature. We love that because you can sign in at home and be like you're in the store.

We have five locations and, for the person who controls it we have it set up in our main office. The ease of access, of being able to change a voice message, it links to that. The person who controls it can approve it and then she just plays it. That's great for when we have to do a holiday message or special events are happening. We love that feature. 

I love the VPN that we set up. A few of us have it on our computers so that if we leave, we can still access the stores. And we can work from home if needed. When I sign into that Kerio VPN, it links me like I'm sitting in the store. It puts me in our secure network so that I can sign on to each individual store and I can run numbers. We work through ICS Vision for our stores. We have a corporate plus five stores and it lets me link to all that. If I have to work from home, it's so much faster than the way we used to do it. It saves me a couple hours of each time I use it from home. It also saves me from having to drive in.

It's the overall ease of everything. It seems to have pretty seamless connectivity for linking our stores.

Also, the firewall and intrusion detection features seem to keep people out of our servers. I know it's a little bit of a process to try to link something new into it because the firewall is very secure, but we haven't had any issues with malware attacks on our end so it must be stopping them.

We haven't really had any major issues. But when we did our last update, we had some trouble with the initial syncing process to get our messaging to go through. But we were also moving a store and a lot was changing during that process. I don't think it was on Kerio's end. It just coincided with the update. Once we got our third-party IT guy involved it was resolved very quickly.

We have been using Kerio Control for about six years.

The stability has been fine. We have no concerns or complaints.

In terms of increasing usage, that's going to end up being discussed in a meeting with our IT guy to see what capabilities it has, how we could expand it, how we could grow with it, and how it could help out day-to-day business.

I've been with the company a little over three years now, but when I came in as general manager it was already in use. The upgrade is the closest that I've been to a deployment.

From start to finish, when doing the upgrade, we were back up in an hour, including the issue we had. Our IT guy let us know what was going on and that there was a series of events he had to do and he did them and we were good to go.

From the old way we used to do things, it's night and day. Before the company brought this on, it was pretty old-school in how it did its phone systems and messaging. The efficiency has doubled, but the company also used to use answering machines way back when.

I've never seen any additional costs incurred or involved, other than the initial.

The biggest lesson from using Kerio Control is the untapped potential there is to link to everything and streamline our business. That's really what it's about for us. Obviously, there's more out there for us to do with it.

As an SMB, Kerio Control is a good fit for our environment. It serves what we need done. I would recommend it for a smaller business because the ease of use and the access it allows us are great.