Snort vs. Juniper SRX

If a colleague was looking to tighten down their network I can easily recommend Snort to them. It gives you some more peace of mind knowing that its always scanning traffic for malicious looking code. Even things your major firewalls and security hardware might miss, Snort has picked up. Its an easy recommendation for me.

Incentivized

Juniper vSRX is an excellent edge gateway device. The combination of Tunneling protocols supported and the advanced routing & security features makes it perfect for this kind of deployment. It is available in physical, virtual appliances as well as support on multiple clouds so you can have the same box be your edge gateway in multiple environments for consistency.

It can also work as a Internet Gateway, DMZ Firewall/Router and it would function just fine.

While it can also work as a DC firewall (North-South), the poor GUI will make it harder in the day to day administration for the multiple policies in a DC.

Incentivized

• The threat intelligence from Cisco TALOS is unparalleled. This is grafted into the Sourcefire application which greatly improves security visibility. With this there are a lot of groups that you can use for white listing or blacklisting, knowing its being updated in the background without additional work from you.
• Flexible. Instead of putting a traditional firewall inline you can put a source fire appliance (or firewall with sourcefire on-board) to not only block/allow traffic, but if you insights into it, and do some forms of threat scoring.
• In depth information. Sometimes a bit overwhelming, but you are able to do more than just see alerts, you can view the full information and packets that lead to the conclusion, though the conclusion is prepared in advance for you.

Incentivized

• The Juniper SRX platform is easy to set up (out of the box).
• The support team responds to tickets quickly and with good solutions.

Incentivized

• There are plenty of false positives in the logs, but no problems noticed related to them.

• Some of the more complex setups (clustered HA, etc.) can be a little difficult to configure.
• The lowest-end model that supports true multi-site HA is relatively expensive. It would be nice to have that option in lower models.
• Some configuration options (particularly the way address book entries are done) can get tedious and make for very long configs.

Incentivized

This is the one area where I have a beef with Juniper. When I called into Cisco TAC, 90% of the time, the first person I spoke with was able to resolve my issue. With Juniper TAC, 90% of the time, the first person I speak with is not able to resolve my issue, seems to almost be reading from a script, and must escalate my ticket. All of which takes time.

Incentivized

Snort was chosen mainly for the ease and cost. With Snort we was able to set up in a matter of minutes without any professional services needed. If you are used to packet tracing the old fashion way, this is the product for you.

Incentivized

Equipment prices ran about the same. Performance and management were also more or less equal. The biggest deciding factors for going with Juniper were (1) fewer security incidents related to SRX firewalls and (2) technical support costs were significantly less.

Incentivized

• The Sourcefire deployment has been very good at actively blocking threats that would have potentially caused loss or compromise.
• It has given us great visibility to our network.

Incentivized

• It is a workhorse for our field operations. It provides the last touch for an ISP to the customer. The customer has no view of the device, but with the repeatability of the device, they do not need to.
• The ability to roll out a dynamic routing protocol attached to a security zone allows elasticity to the environment that supports growth.
• VLAN support on the inside interfaces allow this to be the only device in some smaller deployments we install these in.

Incentivized