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The Cyberoam CR10iNG Unified Threat Management appliance

Editorial Type: Review     Date: 01-2015    Views: 3405      









Intense competition in the small business security appliance market has seen prices in this sector dropping significantly, but Cyberoam's CR10iNG is redefining the benchmark for value

This desktop appliance offers the same security features as Cyberoam's enterprise products and yet it only costs a shade over £300, and this includes a one year subscription to all services.

None of this comes at the expense of performance either as the CR10iNG claims a class-leading firewall throughput of 100Mbits/sec with anti-virus enabled and 60Mbits/sec with all the security services running. We often find that such claims don't match real world performance: not so with Cyberoam.

We hooked the CR10iNG up to the lab's Ixia Xcellon Ultra-NP load generators and saw the IxLoad control software report a solid 100Mbits/sec for HTTP traffic with AV enabled. With all UTM services running, we saw IxLoad report a steady throughput of 65Mbits/sec being 5Mbits/sec faster than claimed. The appliance hardware plays its part as it sports a decent 1.8GHz Intel Atom CPU and 1GB of system memory. It also employs a 4GB CompactFlash card to run the operating system and offers three Gigabit ports for LAN, WAN and DMZ duties.

The appliance incurs a one-time fee of £215 with first year Total Value Subscription (TVS) costing £101, and this enables anti-malware, anti-spam, web and application filtering, IPS and an 8 x 5 support contract. You can reduce your outlay slightly as Cyberoam's Security Value Subscription (SVS) removes anti-spam which reduces this to £73 per year.

The appliance supports routed or transparent bridge modes and we chose the former from the browser-based quick start wizard as we wanted full firewall functions activated. The wizard helped us set up each network port and also offered to run it in a passive monitoring mode or with a predefined security policy applied.

The appliance's firewall rules use port zones to define sources and destinations. They can specify networks and hosts if required and apply service filters, blocking actions and time schedules. Advanced rules are used to apply anti-virus, anti-spam and IPS policies plus IM scanning, limiting Internet access and imposing bandwidth restrictions.

Cyberoam's unique identity based security allowed us to link policies to users and groups as well as systems. It supports a range of user types including those authenticated by an external directory server, or by running Cyberoam's freely available Corporate Client utility.

We loaded the client software onto user desktops which logged them into the appliance and enforced our user-based security policies. It brings a lot of versatility to policies as we could decide which systems a user was allowed to log in from and apply scheduled data transfer limits on their upload and download activities.

For application control policies, Cyberoam provides over 1,200 predefined application types which can be blocked or allowed on a per policy basis. You have 11 predefined policies for web filtering or you can create custom ones from the 85 available URL categories.

Virus scanning is enabled within each firewall rule and can be applied to POP3, SMTP, FTP, HTTP and HTTPS traffic. Quarantining isn't supported for anti-spam, but we could tag, drop or reroute suspect messages and apply the rules to outbound mail.

The web interface provides good monitoring facilities but Cyberoam's free iView Syslog server goes even further. Loaded on a basic Windows desktop, it gathered Syslog data sent from our appliance and provided a remarkable range of detailed reports on all activities and security events.

Competitors will have a tough time matching Cyberoam's CR10iNG as this little desktop appliance is highly affordable. It offers tough security measures, it’s surprisingly easy to deploy, and really delivers on its performance claims. NC

Product: Cyberoam CR10iNG
Supplier: 4Gon Solutions
Web site: www.4gon.co.uk
Price: Appliance and 1year TVS subscription is £316 excluding VAT

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