Barracuda Web Application Firewall Reviews

We primarily use this solution for security purposes. We use it as a firewall.

The interface is great. It's one of the most valuable aspects of the solution. 

The visibility we are able to achieve is quite good. 

The traffic monitoring is very helpful and the URL filtering has been excellent.

Even when we were upgrading to a new OS, we didn't have any difficulties with the product. The stability is good.

We have found that the technical support is very good.

The pricing of the product isn't overly expensive. 

While the UI is good, it can get a little bit complicated. It's not like Next-Gen Firewalls. I need to remember all of the tabs. The sub-tabs should be at the right as they are in the Next-Gen. Mostly, Next-Gen firewalls have everything on the left panel and it will reappear. It would be nice if there was a little more consistency.

I only really have one year of experience with the solution. Therefore, it's hard to discuss missing features. I need more time to explore the product first. 

I have been using the solution for one year.

We haven't had any issues with the stability or the performance, even when switching to a new OS. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

While the solution may be scalable, I don't have enough background to really comment. I haven't been involved in scaling. 

Technical support is quite good. That's the main reason everyone is shifting to Barracuda.

It's from India. I'm in the Middle East. Even though the product is from the UAE, the Middle East, the support is from India. They have good engineers that are well-trained. That said, if you need an L3 issue resolved, those engineers are from other regions. Typically an Indian tech will communicate with the other region directly. The support in the case of L3s likely comes from Europe. In any case, everyone is very helpful and responsive, and we are satisfied with the level of support.

The initial setup is not overly complex or difficult. It's easy enough to execute. That said, the burden has to be getting a bit of the knowledge in regards to routing. That's a tricky area. However, it's pretty much the same as a Next-Gen Firewall configuration.

The pricing is okay, however, there are a few other competitors that are a little bit lower. It's still reasonable. 

I'm an end-user and a customer. 

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. Sometimes the solution can be tricky around filtering, which is why I don't give it perfect marks.

One of the best aspects of the solution is the support provided. Their backend support is fantastic. I've found it's superior to other products, including Cisco. The way the support team treats its customers is great. They really walk you through everything and show you how easy it is to mend issues.

I find the solution to be easy to deploy. You don't need too much technical skill, so you don't need an expert level of understanding.

The reporting aspect of the solution needs improvement. I don't find that it's very good. They could do some work on it to make it much better. It's not that the reporting isn't secure. It's just that I would prefer to store my reports for an extended period of time. Right now, that's not possible and I'd prefer it if that could change. I also would say that the reports themselves are expensive.

I've been using the solution since 2009. It's been just over ten years now.

The stability of the solution is good. I don't think we've experienced bugs, crashes, or glitches.

Scalability with the solution is good. It just requires more licenses, like every other product. If you only apply for the environment, it's scalable with the licenses you have. If you're on the physical appliance, you just have to scale it up by pressing the appliance. It probably won't be just deployed on Azure, because we would need to add more licenses.

We've been adding to our system for a while ago, and we haven't run into any issues with continuing to scale.

The technical support offered by Barracuda is excellent. It's one of the greatest selling points of the solution, They are very supportive and help answer any questions we have.

I have previous experience using Cisco.

The solution doesn't require a user to be too technical. I would say the initial setup is very straightforward. The deployment is easy. It's not what I would call complex in any way.

Overall, I would say that I'm satisfied with the pricing. It's got a good range of pricing, and the cost matches the quality level you get out of the solution.

I used to be a customer before, however, now I am partners with Barracuda.

We use both on-premises and public cloud deployment models.

Overall, I'd give the solution a nine out of ten. I'd give it full marks, but it does have issues on the reporting side. The reports are a lot more expensive, even more so than the work itself. That's why I did not give it a 10.

That said, I would recommend Barracuda Firewalls to anybody, any day of the week. They're fantastic.

We use this as public cloud and a virtual appliance based on Azure Cloud.

It's very simple and predictable because Barracuda provides a vision of the current state of your application. It gives you an understanding of what is happening on your site and any attempts against you at your source. This is the main value that Web Application Firewall provides our company. These aspects are also the main reason for this documentation process.

I think the biggest value comes from the ability of Web Application Firewall to perform analysis of attacks that are registered by it, as well as its ability to analyze source code of those attacks and all traffic that is captured by Web Application Firewall. 

The basic functionality of the Web Application Firewall is pretty good. Therefore in comparison with CloudFlare, Barracuda has significant powerful instruments for analysis of main traffic of requests that we get on the application. If however, we try to compare Barracuda and F5, F5 is more powerful than Barracuda. In any case, it's very hard to make these comparisons, because one product has more powerful features from one point of view, while the other product is better from another point of view.

I can say that it's good only in comparison with some products. All products have approximately the same functionality, but some products are more powerful in certain aspects.

I think the main area for improvement in this product is learning it, as can be seen when comparing it to the F5 web application firewall. F5 has a very powerful learning phase when you start using your web application firewall against your site. The company at this time collects information and parameters about all requests, such as: file downloads, file uploads, authentication, authorization processes, etc. During this period, F5 provides you with the ability to collect most of the necessary information to make a security provision for your web application firewall.

Barracuda has something like this, but not with the same functionality from my point of view. Barracuda is a little bit lower in comparison with other web application firewalls, so the best way to improve Barracuda is to develop and add new features in this area.

A good point for developing this area is to describe some particular use cases. For example, the implementation demands configuration of the application in conjunction with Web Application Firewall to make it available and hosted on the internal web services of Azure. It would be great to have instructions for Barracuda with Azure infrastructure, so we could get a step-by-step manual starting from the creation of the application interface and finishing with the available site including Barracuda. We implemented Barracuda Web Application Firewall and we see who checks the whole process. Each part of this manual relates to a particular service, but it would still help those who implement it to be quicker.

The bottom line is I would like to see an improved learning model to make the creation of the first policy easier and more transparent for an engineer.

If I remember correctly, when applying changes to a policy, the system tries to reward the current system. I didn't check if the site is available, but it seems that certain views could be unavailable during this process. Any changes or configurations submitted demand voiding. This can be a surprise because when you try only to save the configuration but don't commit it, you might think this doesn't take effect. If you don't want to commit this policy exactly at this time the appliance will still start to change it. This might be a quirk of this appliance.

I read that you can scale this system by building redundant schemes and using special appliances to manage certificates, but I didn't try it. Therefore, as a manager I don't know, because I didn't try to make a redundant scheme.

Only a few users at our company implement this, but all visitors to our site are affected by this implementation.

I didn't fight with them because all features and implementations that I tried didn't demand any help from technical support.

We actually switched to Barracuda because it's cheaper than F5. This might not be the case for others, because there are several solutions that are cloud based. It is a service of a service and in some cases this kind of product would be cheaper than Barracuda. It depends on the implementation scheme and business needs. In some cases, Barracuda is cheaper, in some cases Barracuda is more expensive. In our case it was cheaper.

The initial setup was very easy and straightforward. I don't remember how long deployment took, but it was very quick. If I remember, you just need to assign the address management interface and add additional IP addresses to other interfaces, enable them, etc. After that, your site is available already. It's much easier than F5, for example.

We didn't use a vendor for implementation. I just used standard documentation from their resources and it was enough to roll out this appliance in our infrastructure. It's very easy. I didn't request them, because the documents provided by their site was enough to roll out this product by ourselves without additional help.

Barracuda costs us $8,000 per year. Barracuda costs $20,000 for a full subscription, when you try to protect multi-site infrastructure, in different geographical zones and for different data centers. If you have only one site, Barracuda will be cheaper.

We chose Barracuda because in our case it was cheaper.

The biggest lesson I learned is that our site is attacked every day.

I would recommend Barracuda, but this recommendation is based on our particular case. For some cases this solution is good, but for some cases it's not. It's very hard to answer directly because of all the aspects that should be taken into account when you try to answer this question.

I would rate it as eight out of ten.

I am a system integrator and this is one of the solutions that I implement for my customers.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the simplicity of configuration. 

This solution makes management easy.

I really like the firewall weblog that allows me to see what is being blocked, why, and how I can apply a fix.

I would like to see an improved capacity to store logs so that they will be available for a longer time. From my experience, and over time, I have noticed that Barracuda appliances do not store logs for a very long time. What this means is that people have to buy the Barracuda Reporting Server. This is quite expensive, at three or four times the price of the equipment. So, if users have only one or two appliances then it doesn't make sense for them to buy a Reporting Server. If they decide to export those logs from the Barracuda appliance to a SIEM then the format of the report gets lost because Barracuda has custom reports.  Where I used to work, our logs would last for about one week. However, where I am now, we do not have logs beyond one day.

This is a very stable appliance.

This physical appliance is not a solution that scales because once I use it at capacity, I have to buy a new one. The virtual appliance is scalable because if I am at capacity then I can increase my license to another plan.

For the WAF, capacity is not a function of the number of users. Rather, it is based on the servers that it is protecting. Two of my current clients and one hundred and fifty, and two hundred and fifty users, respectively.

Technical support for this solution is wonderful. It is not just for the firewall, but all of Barracuda has good support. I have been dealing with them since 2009, and in my experience, they attend to you. They take the time to explain things. Even if you want to consider something new, they will guide you on what to do.

Overall, I would rate their support very high.

The initial setup of this solution is very straightforward.

When I first set up this solution in 2009, it was for my company and I didn't require assistance from anybody. I later when for training, and am now an integrator. Today I set this solution up for other companies, and I can say that the initial setup has been straightforward all along.

Definitely, I would recommend Barracuda because of its simplicity. I know that they are now integrating the Web Application Firewall on Prime, in the cloud, as well.

The only thing that is a challenge for me is storage, which limits my reporting.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The solution is our WAF for Azure. It is for operation for Transit CAS applications.

We primarily use the solution for the protection of the active WAF. It offers quite good security.

The solution is stable.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, especially if you enlist assistance.

We've had some blocks of the application and some false positives. Barracuda needs to ensure there are fewer false positives in general. There also needs to be less of a learning curve on the application in general. That might help us eliminate false positives as well. Basically, they need to help new users better learn and understand the solution.

I have an issue with the console currently. I cannot access the console from inside the network. When I access the entire network, it kicks me off all the time. I opened a case with technical support. We've checked the firewall the perimeter firewall, and we've tried to fix that problem, however, it's still the problem. I have to access the console from outside all the time to this day.

I've been using the solution for a while now. It's been about five years.

The stability is okay. We don't have issues with the reliability of Barracuda. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze at all. I'd describe it as stable for the most part.

The scalability may be okay. However, we have only one Barracuda gateway. We don't really need to scale the solution fight now.

We might have about 500 users within our company using the solution right now.

I've reached out to technical support in relation to a console problem and they have yet to fix the issue for us. All they've done is told me to check the firewall, which I have, and to install a new version. I upgraded the version, however, the issue persists. They haven't been extremely helpful and I'd have to say that I am disappointed with their level of service so far.

Overall, I would rate the support at an eight out of ten.

We also use Imperva. We use both solutions at once.

I'm not the administrator of the installation process. Therefore, it's hard for me to say if it was difficult or complex. I can't really comment on the initial implementation.

That said, it's my understanding, from talking to the administrator in the past, that it wasn't too complex.

I'm not sure how long the deployment took. I only really deployed the last application protection.

We had the support of the partner for the implementation, which helped iron out any difficulties.

We're just a transportation company. We're a customer. We don't have a business relationship with Barracuda.

I recommend the solution to other organizations for protecting applications specifically in Azure.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

Typically these web application firewalls act as an additional layer primarily for traffic. The web application firewalls are more of a safeguard if a company still has legacy technologies, for which they don't have the patches. It's basically used for the protection and security of web applications.

The solution has been quite stable. It's reliable.

The initial setup is mostly straightforward.

I wouldn't say that the solution is flexible. The technology is moving towards having the firewall, which is distributed to each workload, rather than having a static firewall pertaining to a particular application or a cohort of applications. There are other solutions that are much more flexible in this regard. VMware, for example, gives good flexibility in this regard.

The solution needs to leverage some additional features to a broader scale of software-defined networks.

Given the distributed computing and decentralized architecture with people working in hybrid modules, there'll be lesser and lesser control. People would like to have, for example,  edge computing, et cetera, which is going to be the future for computing. Hence every organization would like to scale the design to the extent where they would like to have their defenses also go along with their workloads. 

If, for an SDN, I need to go to VMware, and, for WAF, I need to go to Barracuda, or different other firewalls, the company is losing market share. They need to increase flexibility, agility, scaling, et cetera, as that is going to be the new normal, maybe in the next two to five years. 

We've been using the solution for close to two years at this point.

The solution is quite stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

I'm not sure about the scalability. I would need to explore it more. The most scalable products are likely VMware's NSX, as it is a company that's bit on cloud migration cloud transformation strategies. They'd like to ensure their workloads are safe and secure. I don't see this in traditional RAFs or even firewalls. 

It's difficult to found how many users are on the solution at this time as we use multiple web application firewalls on different applications. It is not every application however, there would be certain applications that would have a WAF. Likely, it's around 10,000 users across applications.

We do plan to continue to use the solution into the future.

We haven't really had to engage with technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are in general.

We did use a different solution before switching to Barracuda. Typically, we run a POC first before moving onto anything new, which is what happened in this case.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. However, it does help to have some depth of knowledge with the solution. 

I cannot recall the exact amount of time the deployment took.

While I don't have dedicated staff on the solution to handle maintenance, I have about six people on my team that can cover whatever needs to be done when something arises.

Licensing is something the procurement team takes care of. I don't have any insights in terms of the licensing agreement or costs that may be involved.

We are customers and end-users.

Typically, we keep updating our infrastructure, and therefore, we are likely using the latest version of the solution, however, I do not have the version number on-hand.

I would recommend the solution to other organizations.

Overall, we've been quite satisfied with the capabilities of this product. I would rate it at an eight out of ten.

Our customers value the solution's simplicity. 

Occasionally, upon installation of the Energize Updates, the plans will go off track, something which necessitates us calling up their support team for another update. 

The frequency of the release of the updates is also an issue. In the production environment, Firmware cannot be frequently updated. It would be better if their updates would be released annually. 

We have been dealing with Barracuda Web Application Firewall for more than four years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. 

Our experience with technical support has been very positive. 

The initial setup is easy.

While I would have to check on the price of the solution, I feel it to be okay and it matches the market price.

F5, Imperva and RedBear are the main competitors of Barracuda in our area.

I do not know if they possess certain features which Barracuda Web Application Firewall lacks. I would have to check. 

I would recommend the solution to someone looking for a new web application firewall.

I rate Barracuda Web Application Firewall as an eight out of ten. I do not give the product a higher rating because there are other solutions in Sri Lanka of which the vendors are aware through the Gartner Reports. I believe the solution is not not counted amongst the Gartner leader Quadrant.

Our primary use case is for banking compliance. I'm a presales engineer. 

I like the dashboard. 

The policy updates could be improved. 

I've been using this product for four years. 

Scalability is good but could be improved. 

The initial setup isn't too complex, we have a master plan when we implement it for our customers and deployment usually takes around three months. We have several people on our team involved with maintenance; usually, our customers also have maintenance staff.