SonicWall NSa Reviews

SonicWall has USCS and anti-virus at the gateway level. Everything is filtered, and if it detects an intruder, it drops the line.

We have security as a service, and they make recommendations about adding to the denylist and other things. That part could be more accessible and more user-friendly. I'd like to see SonicWall add a user-friendly interface where our internal team can drag and drop everything. We get the IOCs from the security companies, so these things can be filtered and blocked at the gateway level. They could add a feature where our team uploads the IOCs in an Excel spreadsheet instead of entering them in one at a time. 

We've been using SonicWall for almost seven years.

Yeah, it is much stable and we have been using NSa the previous version before also, the old device. It's all so far okay. It's stable only.

We could expand by another 20 percent, and the product would still cover us. It shouldn't be a problem. We haven't faced many challenges. It's a gateway-level firewall product, and we have 140 users.

SonicWall support is good.

We used Cisco a long time ago, but we moved to SonicWall almost eight years ago.

Setting up SonicWall isn't that complicated, but you need to know the scope — what's allowed and what isn't. But it's not as complex as Cisco. The deployment takes a couple of days, but we could probably do it faster. We upgraded from the older version of SonicWall NSa to the latest appliance in less time. 

It doesn't require a large team for maintenance. If we can manage it, anyone can. We only have three people on our team, and we can manage it without issue. 

We used the local redistributor here in Bahrain. They were knowledgeable and had SonicWall experience, so they didn't face much of a challenge. It was straightforward. The only difference is that we went with high availability — two devices. 

We have a yearly license. SonicWall's price is better than other vendors. We get a discount of about 15 percent off the initial cost.

I rate SonicWall eight out of 10. I recommend it. If you implement SonicWall, it'll be a smooth journey.

We have installed this firewall appliance across cloud and on-premises environments, our clients primarily use the VPN functionality.

If a customer wants to use the firewall, they have to pay more money for the cloud. By having a firewall solution, they can configure the VPN through the firewall, enabling them to avoid the high costs. Once you deploy the firewall in the cloud solution, then you will get protection for the gateway as well.

We are a service-based company and have implemented over 200 appliances for our customers.

The VPN functionality and intrusion prevention service (IPS) are the most valuable features.

I am a technical engineer, I have complete knowledge of SonicWall. I can do all of the configurations for the firewall. We are a service-based company and I handle the different solutions. If they need any requirement or they any action on the firewall then I can do that myself. 

The only thing that needs improvement is the VPN because we need to pay to connect the points.

I have been using SonicWall for 5 years.

We have found the NSa appliance to be stable and is comparable to FortiGate.

We have expanded the solution with several of our customers and this worked great. We have over 200 customers who use SonicWall.

Level 1 and 2 support issues are handled by our in-house team, but for more complex, level 3 issues we utilise the vendor. The call response is great.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We are a service-based provider and implement in-house.

We also implement similar appliances from Fortinet and Sophos.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. It's a good security product, so I wouldn’t give it a lower rating.

The solution is used basically a parameter firewall and to secure the company network.

The content filtering is very good.

The solution is easy to use.

They offer good antivirus solutions. It's basically a complete package.

The solution is stable. 

There's always room for improvement. 

For example, the monitoring system is in need of improvement. Their monitoring system is too expensive. Most of the company doesn't apply the monitoring system as it's too expensive. Some more monitoring features should be built into the firewall device itself.

Management spends a lot of money on the device, and they want to know what is working, et cetera. To understand this, we need some reports, graphs, and figures. Without these items, management may not be convinced they are spending the money in the right way. Having reports that reflect the work done to keep the network secure would show the benefits and the ROI in a positive way that would help sell management on the product itself.

The ongoing service fees are high.

The solution could use more online educational tools to help users understand the underlying functionality of the product. Things like videos and tutorials could help a lot. 

I've been working with the solution for the last nine years or so at this point. It's been almost a decade.

The solution is very stable. We can do 80% to 90% of tasks with no issues whatsoever. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution can scale, however, in Pakistan, it's not easy not to spend so much. One device can last over five to six years. You can say scale, however, you need to have an understanding of what functionality you will need over the years. Over four to six years, the device can fulfill your requirements. After six to seven years, you can replace it with another model or another brand to meet your updated needs.

I didn't use support over the last nine years, except for handling the device replacement itself. I needed a device replacement due to some damage, and they fulfilled my request and requirements. In terms of tasks such as configuration issues, I've never actually asked for assistance for those queries and therefore could not rate how helpful or responsive they are when they cover those matters. 

In the past, I have also used Fortinet and FortiGate as well as Juniper. I have 19 years of experience with various solutions. I have used multiple devices including Cisco, Juniper, FortiGate, SonicWall, and others. Basically, FortiGate and SonicWall are more or less the same types of solution. However, the SonicWall is easier to install than FortiGate.

I have deployed the solution myself. I did not need the help of an integrator or consultant.

The pricing is reasonable, however, all firewalls have high prices for subscriptions for their services to cover after warranty needs for content filtering, for antiviruses, for web filtering, et cetera. All firewalls have extra prices. 

After spending so much money year over year, we were surprised that we had to still pay more than the device cost just to covers services. That's why you may find that most companies stop their services and just running the firewall as a box. Most small companies stop their services just due to the high subscription fees. That said, multinationals or larger organizations likely still pay the service fees.

In places like Pakistan, a developing country, it's hard to continuously pay, as we find the continuing service fees expensive. They should work to make an exception for certain regions such as ours.

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I can't remember the exact versions we are using. We may be on version 6, and the models I have used include the 2600, 2500, and 3600 series.

I'd warn new users that the box is huge. The box has multiple functionalities and most users are not trained. They can't benefit from all the functionality as they don't know that it exists. Due to the lack of knowledge, most users don't leverage additional functionalities which they should. While the solution offers good devices and reasonable pricing for the box, companies need to educate themselves on how they can best use the product to their advantage. SonicWall can help by posting more videos and sharing more information.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution from our firewall endpoint VPN. It does have a spam filter, SSL, DPI, and numerous other security features. We've got the full license suite.

The DPI-SSL is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's handy. It's nice.

The scalability is okay.

The initial implementation isn't too bad, once you get used to the process.

We're not happy with the device itself. We're obviously moving away from it for a reason that they're a Swiss pocket-knife of devices and they do a lot. However, nothing is really done well. They don't specialize in one thing that they excel at. They try instead to do almost everything and end up failing.

We're not particularly fond of the way it generally performs. We are finding ourselves rebooting often. There are freeze-ups and that kind of thing. The stability needs to improve exponentially.

Technical support is pretty slow to respond and escalate matters.

The cost of the solution is quite high.

The solution could use an invisible DPI-SSL or something that doesn't require a certificate rewrite. Most of the other vendors are doing that now. 

The SSL VPN performance-wise is terrible.

We've been using the solution for about three years at this point.

The stability isn't the best. It freezes. We have to reboot a lot. The device just doesn't work very well.

The scalability is okay, It's marginal, however, it is possible.

We have about 300 people on-premises that use the solution.

We've been in touch with technical support, ad currently, we find them to be below average in their support capabilities. Firewall support is just adequate. Right now, with COVID and everything, you are looking at 45 minutes to an hour to get the first technician on the phone. Often it takes two or three days to get it escalated. It's slow.

I personally previously used Cisco devices at another company, and therefore I have some experience with them. 

We're currently migrating away from this solution at the moment. We do not like the way the device performs.

In terms of deployment, there is a bit of a learning curve right off the top, as I come from a Cisco ASA background. It's more object-based, a little bit different. Once you get the knack of it, it's actually pretty nice in some ways.

That said, operationally, I would recommend anybody that deploys one of these to make sure they develop their own SOP for naming conventions, for objects, object groups, object types, service groups, service objects, et cetera, so that it's easier to manage and understand what you're doing. Generally speaking, it's just a best practices kind of process for administrative work. If you've got multiple admins, it's important that everything is contiguous, meaning everybody understands and works under that same parameters. It's like any other operating environment.

In terms of maintenance, there are two of us that generally manage it and maintain it on a fairly regular basis. I'm a network engineer and the department manager, who's not a system engineer, (however, is well-versed), also can perform maintenance as needed.

We handled the implementation in-house. We did not need an integrator or consultant to assist us.

While I don't know the exact amount off the top of my head, I would estimate the licensing package was about $15,000 to $20,000 a year.

Your original purchase includes the purchase of the hardware, licensing, and support. It's not a cheap device. 

We are customers and end-users.

We are currently using the NSA 4600. It's a full security appliance. We're using the latest version of the solution.

It's our primary firewall/VPN endpoint. It's used 24/7, 365. Due to the nature of our work, uptime is critical.

Ultimately, if you were to ask me if I were to recommend this device, I would say no.

I'd rate the solution at a three out of ten, simple due to the fact that the stability isn't there, and it's an expensive solution.

When it comes to securing VLANs, the primary use case for SonicWall NSa is VPNs. 

Compared to Cisco, SonicWall NSa is much easier to configure. Cisco tends to be cumbersome through the web interface. It's easy through the command line, but when you're troubleshooting something, you're usually not going through the command line. When you're digging through data trying to find if something happened, you're usually digging through the logs, through the web interface, because it should be much easier. In Cisco, the logs are odd and you have to be really particular on what you want. You have to look for specific details. 

This process is much easier SonicWall NSa. I want to know where the problem started and where it ended, that's it; and it's really clear in SonicWall NSa. Whereas in Cisco it's just not clear at all.

It would be amazing if all of the ports on the throughput devices were 10 gig or 100 gig. That would make it so much easier for me to designate 10 gigs throughout the whole network. Right now, with SonicWall NSa, I'm doing designations like "use 10 gigs through the whole network until you hit firewall." In that case, all of the traffic that has firewall enabled on it drops to one gig.

That causes issues with throughput, especially when you're talking about data stores and Ice Guzzy, or when you're splitting things out with VLANs. 

MAC address filtering on the VPN and on the firewall itself would be a good thing to add as well. If it's there, I don't know where it is.

Automation would also be good. 

The implementation for VLANs is a little bit cumbersome. It would be good to make that a little bit easier.

I've used SonicWall probably on and off for the last couple of years. It depends on which client I'm working with.

SonicWall NSa is stable. 

Just adding multiple sites is easy. Clustering them is pretty straightforward. But if I needed to expand them in series, that's a little bit more complicated.

I've never used SonicWall tech support. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

Hire a network guy or have a service that's going to monitor and manage SonicWall NSa for you.

It is a brilliant product. It is a Unified Threat Management (UTM) system. It has got about 11 security services that take care of your perimeter security. It takes care of any kind of cyber threats that could come in. 

It takes care of creating VPNs between two SonicWalls instantly and very easily. It has got spyware in it as well as a firewall. It has also got a gateway antivirus and an application firewall that can block things from outside.

It would be useful to have an application firewall that prevents the outside world from seeing your private IPs. You don't need to publicize your private IPs to the outside world, and you can create a barrier, like a proxy server.

I have been using this solution for four years. We are using SonicWall NSA 3600.

It is very stable.

The product that we have is not scalable. You'll have to buy a firewall model that suits your requirement with a certain amount of growth built into it. They have other products that are scalable, and they are the 9600 series ones.

Currently, we have about 300 users. We plan to keep using this solution.

I have contacted their technical support, and I have received good support.

Its initial setup is absolutely straightforward. It took less than an hour. There were no issues.

I did it myself. Currently, we are maintaining it ourselves. We are not getting it done from anyone outside, but we have the subscription for SonicWall so that the security areas are taken care of by them.

Normally, when we buy any product, we buy it with a five-year service built into it. Later on, depending on the growth of the organization, we go for a new one or an upgrade.

We've been using SonicWall since 2006. When we decided on SonicWall, I had tried another product for 15 days, but it was not serving the requirements that we had. Therefore, we decided on SonicWall.

I would very much recommend this solution to others. I would rate SonicWall NSA an eight out of ten.

We use this firewall to protect our perimeter. We create NAT policies and have a DMZ set up.

It is also used to filter the internet for all of our users.

The most valuable feature is the sandbox.

The content filter needs to be improved. I would also like to see better application filtering.

When we are troubleshooting problems, we find that the logs we see are not sufficient. It makes it difficult to find out what the main issue is. It means that we have to search further or perform another test to see what happened.

Technical support is in need of improvement.

We have been using SonicWall for approximately 15 years, and more specifically, SonicWall NSA for the past 10.

The stability is fine and we don't have any issues. We have never needed to report a problem.

We have about 20 people in the company who are protected by this product, and I think that the scalability is fine. However, I would say that it is best for small to medium-sized organizations.

When we have gone to the vendor for support, I don't think that the quality was very good. I would rate the vendor support a six out of ten.

I used to work with Check Point, and they are very good when it comes to application filtering.

The initial setup is easy and the deployment can be completed in between two and four hours. This includes installation and adjustments that need to be made.

We have an in-house SonicWall specialist.

When implemented properly, the total cost of operation is very low.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing SonicWall NSA is that they have to be very clear about what it is that they're looking for. It is a good solution for small and medium-sized businesses, and when you are very clear about what you need, you can implement a lot of other security services with a total cost of operation that is very low.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Mainly our customers use this solution as a general firewall. 

Currently, our most popular firewall is Fortinet FortiGate 40F. We do have all the way up to 100's, but most of our customers are small, medium-sized businesses.

We have a FortiAnalyzer that resides on Azure and we're getting a FortiManager because of the new capability to roll them out based on the serial number

With FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer, you have many more capabilities than you do with SonicWall.

I wouldn't say that. If it has no impact on them, it's doing its job correctly.

There are no specific features that you can say are better than anything else. It's very flexible and it meets our customer's needs.

The Fortinet Firewall is not the easiest firewall to maintain, nor is to set up and configure. Checkpoint and Sonos are much easier.

SonicWall, from my point of view is the same category as Fortinet. Checkpoint and Sonos are easier to use, but they don't have as many features as SonicWall.

You can do zero-trust networking with SonicWall, but it's not easy. Also, their desktop anti-virus sucks.

I have been using SonicWall since it was Netscreen — which was years ago.

When you buy it based on the load that you expect to use, there are no scalability issues, unless you swap them out.

SonicWall has exceptional tech support. I would rate checkpoint support best, SonicWall next, and Fortinet would be third. I would give SonicWall's tech support a rating of 7.5 to eight.

The structure of dealing with them is good. Once you get through to a support person, the support is very good. But getting through, getting to the point where you have someone on the line can be difficult. 

Overall, they're good at their job and they speak English.

The level of tech support varies: sometimes you get lucky and they're exceptional, and sometimes it's somebody that isn't that good.

If you don't set it up correctly, you are putting your customer's network at risk. They still haven't fixed a lot of the little issues that Dell introduced into the product line, but they're trying.

There are settings that if you don't set them correctly, you could potentially jeopardize your customer's network. 

SonicWall is probably easier to set up than Fortinet.

The pricing of SonicWall is still in line with Fortinet and Checkpoint. Personally, if I were presented with a decision between SonicWall, Checkpoint, or Fortinet, it would be a no-brainer.

If you're interested in SonicWall, consider checkpoint or Fortinet first.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven.

They don't have independent testing. They haven't been independently rated — or another way to put it: Gardner rates them poorly. Because of this, we can't sell SonicWall to customers as easily as we can sell Fortinet or Checkpoint.

The solution is primarily used as a perimeter firewall for a gateway toward public internet traffic. Basically, it is a gateway between our internal network and public traffic.

Feature wise, the content filtering is good.

The basic firewall rules of the solution are great.

The product has a lot of bugs, actually. We are facing some issues with this product. The DPI SSL feature which is there, it is not working properly.

The IRL, when it was installed, had us facing some issues. However, as they kept on uploading the images, the issues are starting to get fixed. 

They already have this feature of advanced capture, set rotation, and so it is a next-generation firewall only. They could improve on their software side. Their software, which is managing the hardware, it's not up to the mark.

We've been using our current particular model (NSA 5600, the most current model) for the last two years. The other firewall we were using, SonicWall 5500 we've used for the last seven or eight years. 

It took some time for us to establish stability within the solution at the beginning. At this point, we find it to be quite stable except for the DPI SSL feature.

We had already scaled from the older version, the 5500, however, the 5600, is quite a new product. They have since changed the OS, so it ended up being a bit complex from the earlier version. The complexity is there, obviously. It's not that easy to manage. You really need to have someone with knowledge right there with you.

It is an internal firewall. All of our traffic, internal traffic, goes through this firewall only. There are somewhere around, at any point in time, 600, 700 users. We have total sync of 2,000 users, 2,000 plus. But at any point in time, 600 users are there, connected. It runs continuously, on a daily basis.

We've never contacted technical support in the past. We go through our vendor. We don't call SonicWall. 

While there are a lot of options on the market, we only use SonicWall at this time. We have used Sophos in the past previously. We found that Sophos Firewall had more flexibility compared to SonicWall, especially in the configuration capabilities.

he initial setup was actually it was done by our vendor partner. And it was not difficult for them. However, during the initial set up, we faced some issues. It was not easy until there were image upgrades, and now those issues are fixed. 

We've also outsourced the maintenance part of the solution's upkeep to our vendor. We only do the followup and we level call. Basic manageability, they do the operation, we manage at our end. Basic operations. But for other calls, we level call with the vendor.

We hired our vendor partner to do the initial implementation for us. We didn't handle it in-house.

I'm not sure what the pricing of the product is. It falls within a middle range in terms of pricing. It' not the cheapest or more expensive. 

The SSL VPN feature, which is what we needed to purchase, is a separate license.

There's a lot of firewalls available, including Cisco, FortiGate, and Juniper firewalls too. There are many alternatives.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with SonicWall.

I wouldn't recommend the solution, actually. It's hard to set up and the stability takes a while to establish. They need to do better on their software side, and other solutions, like Sophos, have more flexibility in their configuration capabilities.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

The solution helps with VPN. 

The most valuable feature I've found is VPN and web protection, particularly with navigation assessment. We use the application control feature to create rules controlling specific application navigation. 

The web interface administration of SonicWall NSa could be improved. Compared to Sophos and FortiGate, making rules is easier with those systems.

The solution is expensive. Its pricing is based on the number of users. 

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.