WatchGuard Review
August 16, 2019

WatchGuard Review

Greg Merideth | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction with WatchGuard Network Security

As an IT consultant for many organizations, deploying WatchGuard gives me the centralized control, access and reporting I need to keep my clients as secure as possible. Dimension Control allows me to centrally control all of my clients border protection devices while also providing me a global view of each endpoint through TDR and Authpoint. Their MSP tools are improving on each release.

Pros

  • Centralized management of the entire WatchGuard infrastructure through Dimension control and reporting.
  • Integration of two-factor authentication for both domain and VPN logins.
  • WatchGuard technical support has always been a key point in using their devices.

Cons

  • Collective MSP reporting for clients has always been an issue. A more generalized view of an end-user's activity is often called for by my clients for a given end-user. A report that has the ability to remove "background traffic" like Windows updates. My clients would like to see a report along the lines of "user a was on facebook.com for 88 minutes, Spotify for 90" etc...
  • On initial deployment, the free-ware based wireless access points were problematic to the point we threw them away in lieu of another product. To this day, my clients do not want to use/trust WatchGuard wireless AP's. Tying a license to an AP, like Cisco, is why they will never be deployed. The ones in place work, don't need to be reset, and don't have a license tied to them for all of the services offered.
  • WatchGuard has always been a positive ROI for us.
We are the WatchGuard partner.
Through either the WebUI, WatchGuard System Manger or Dimension Control the usability is well implemented. I would still like to see an Active Directory authentication test in WSM as this feature only exists in the WebUI.
We benefit from the services bundled in the total security package. We would benefit if each service was offered (and it is) as a separate package as we would simply buy them all. Having them bundled helps.
In the past we've used Sonicwalls and Fortigate devices along with several Cisco firewalls. We settled on WatchGuard over the years for their simplicity of use, reporting, and central control through Dimension as well as Dimension logging.
Given the range of devices from simple XTM30 models through M300 and upwards, there are few areas where WatchGuard Network Security as a border protection system is not well suited.

WatchGuard Network Security Feature Ratings

Identification Technologies
9
Visualization Tools
7
Content Inspection
10
Policy-based Controls
10
Active Directory and LDAP
10
Firewall Management Console
10
Reporting and Logging
7
VPN
10
High Availability
10
Stateful Inspection
10
Proxy Server
10

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