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The upshot is that mid-sized businesses can now get affordable, enterprise level features without compromising on performance.

The CR1000iNG-XP on review claims a huge firewall throughput of over 117Gbps, but prices start from only £12,106 excluding VAT for the appliance, plus a one-year Total Value Subscription (TVS). To put this in perspective, Dell's SonicWALL SuperMassive 10800 has a top 40Gbps firewall performance, but can cost many times as much.

It can also be easily upgraded as the appliance has five expansion slots. The quoted price includes an 8-port Gigabit module and Cyberoam offers additional 4 and 8-port copper, 8-port fibre and 4-port 10-Gigabit SFP+ modules. This solidly built 2U rack system has 6GB of DDR3 memory and a 4GB CompactFlash card for Cyberoam's OS. Its 1TB SATA hard disk can be used as a report repository for the onboard iView Syslog server and an internal email quarantine area.

We found deployment swift and it was helped immeasurably by the fact that Cyberoam ensures complete consistency across its products. Each one runs the same software so if you're upgrading from a smaller Cyberoam appliance, you are already familiar with the larger ones.

The web console opens with a quick start wizard which helped to set up the network ports and routed or transparent bridge modes. We selected routed mode and the wizard also offered to apply one of two predefined security policies for immediate protection.

A key feature is Cyberoam's identity-based security which allowed us to apply policies to users and groups as well as systems. Standard users install the Corporate Client utility on their Windows, Linux or Mac workstations and Cyberoam now offers free clients for Android and iOS mobile devices. Users can also authenticate with an external directory server and are automatically logged in to the appliance. Clientless users don't need to log on, but in this case you can't apply surfing and data transfer quotas, or Internet access time restrictions.

Security policies are simple to create and we used firewall rules to define port zones, sources, destinations, networks and hosts. Within these we could apply service filters, blocking actions plus time schedules and activate policies for the various security services including anti-virus, anti-spam and IPS. We used Cyberoam's identity based security to apply web and application filters, Internet access and bandwidth usage policies to users and groups. Furthermore, we could enforce data transfer limitations on uploads and downloads and have different values for daily, weekly, monthly and yearly limits.

The appliance offers extensive web filtering features and we could choose from 85 URL categories to block or allow. For anti-spam measures we could move suspect messages to the hard disk's quarantine area, provide a spam digest service to our users and email them regular reports. The price even includes Cyberoam's embedded iView syslog server which stores data from the appliance's logs and provides impressive levels of graphing and reporting. No additional components are required either as the iView dashboard is accessed directly from the appliance's web console.

The iView home page provides a complete graphical summary of all network and user activity, while clicking on any bar graph allowed us to drill down for more information. Along with trending, iView includes compliance reports such as HIPAA, PCI and SoX, and these can be exported to produce hard copy.

Cyberoam's CR1000iNG-XP delivers enterprise performance to mid-sized businesses at a very tempting price. It doesn't compromise on security features, it's very easy to deploy and the embedded iView reporting adds to its value proposition. NC

Product: Cyberoam CR1000iNG-XP
Supplier: VOIPon Solutions
Web site: www.voipon.co.uk
Price: Appliance £12,106, 1 year TVS subscription £7,266 (£19,372) excluding VAT