Barracuda CloudGen Firewall vs. HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN

The firewalls management is made easy through its very good management software. It has a lot of features such as VPN, ATP, IPS, Real-time log views, Active Directory integration, Virus Scanning of traffic / file downloads, High Availability Failover, Qos / Traffic Shaping, and a nice quick glance dashboard.

Incentivized

Have remote sites and need them to feel local? Want to get all your locations virtually on the same network? This is the way. And if you're like us and need an easy way to manage all your remote locations in one place this is the tool you want to use.

Incentivized

• Increased level of network protection against threats.
• Visibility and control of applications that users access.
• URL Filtering to block unauthorized or prohibited websites on the internal corporate network.
• Protection against diverse malware at the edge of the network.
• Firewall redundancy with another backup appliance.

Incentivized

• The software and web interface is nicely designed
• Fewer bugs than some other competing services

Incentivized

• Very complex and steep learning curve to get up to speed.
• Multiple ways to configure for the same service or feature. Takes time to determine "your" customized build.
• Interface can sometimes be clunky when trying to determine how it's organized or arranged. Again, steep learning curve.

• There are a lot of menus for items to hide under
• Often there are alarms that are false positives due to bugs in the code - these are usually rectified in the next patch but that seems to be a common occurrence with updates
• Can only have 7 "BIOs" - which are effectively policies that you use to choose how traffic is handled in terms of routing and QoS
• Devices throughput is capped by Aruba licensing meaning that's an additional concern you'll have to monitor and take into consideration when choosing ISPs.
• Alerts sometimes don't tell you things you'd like to know (like when a site is nearing its bandwidth cap)

Incentivized

Easy enough to use and configure using the management UI. Reporting from the web filter is a little clunky, and not very user friendly. To be perfectly honest, once it's set up and running, there isn't a lot to do from the day-to-day side of things, which is not a bad thing.

The product and its management as a whole are worth investigating for any kind of people interested in looking at new SD-WAN appliances. The devices possess a lot of capability for granularity which makes them much more advanced than other products I've worked with in the past. Ironically, for all the granularity though, this product is held back that you can ultimately only have 7 different policies for routing decisions. We've ran into instances where we wanted two sites to only share certain routes between each other (through the use of tags which are basically an arbitrary way to say this traffic is special) but then we had to collapse some of our routing decisions in order to make a specific route table for these two to be able which felt like a step back in the advanced routing decisions we had previously made

Incentivized

They are very quick to answer the phone and I think I haven’t waited more than 5 minutes in the queue and if you have to hang up they actually call you back when it’s your turn in line. They have a secure tunnel that you can open for them to get into your device and help you with basically anything. It’s pretty magical if you ask me.

Incentivized

We used a much alder Cisco ASA router that was chocking our bandwidth and it couldn’t really be compared. It was clunky and horrible at best. Our WatchGuard was overly complicated and difficult to manage and required a version matching thick client installed locally to manage the firewall. The Barracuda solved a bunch of issues from both of these devices and allows me to really save time and money with its easy to configure the interface and inexpensive yet quality device and interface allow me to feel like I am getting a great value for my security.

Incentivized

Prisma SD-WAN is a very simple solution to configure and maintain (so much to the point that in that environment, I questioned if my skills as a Network Engineer were needed). However it worked almost primarily on its own with very little input, by default and at the time of review had no way to do fully mesh (which was desired), and constantly suffered from memory leak. Its integrations were through the use of obscure tags and suffered from a "when it works - it works but when it doesn't - it doesn't and you don't know why" mentality. In contrast, HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN gives you a lot of insight into what is going on with the site, the integrations are done easily within Orchestrator (the control plane), and ultimately the product is typically a very stable product with many ways to configure and tweak the solution to fit your business needs.

Incentivized

• Really neutral given we came from the x series. The move to the x series was a huge positive in terms of time spent managing and the ability to get what needed to be done, well done. The move to the NG was just the next step.
• I will say the one thing, in terms of value, that is given is the firewall admin application. This one program saves a ton of time in configuration versus using the web-based configuration. You can only pick one, and for me, it's a no brainer - turn the web-based config off and use the app.

Incentivized

• ROI is still to be determined as you have to calculate the existing hardware costs
• Theoretically you could be saving lots of time managing all the hardware in between sites
• SDWAN is still new and may take an entirely new budget to accomplish

Incentivized