KerioControl Reviews

The filtering rules are valuable. The product is easy to use.

There is no protocol for VPN in Android. It would be good if the product added a protocol for VPN. The upgrades make the network slower.

I have been using the solution for four years.

I rate the product’s stability a seven out of ten.

The solution is scalable. Four people in our company are using the solution. We are planning to increase the number of users to five or six.

I have contacted the support team by email. The team's answers are good. They answer quickly.

Positive

The solution was easy to deploy. Documentation was available online so that we could install it easily.

We installed the product in-house in a couple of months.

We have seen an ROI on the product. It is efficient. We are satisfied with it.

The pricing is reasonable. We have to pay approximately EUR 175 for the product.

We are working for some customers. If someone wants to buy the solution, they must check the internet. The internet is full of advice, which would help them with any questions they have. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

The solution is user-friendly, has a very easy menu, and is a complete firewall for small or mid-range networks.

We have 100 internet bandwidths, and we want to use these bandwidths, and our Carrier supports 900 bandwidth. However, in the future, we will have problems as we will require a larger bandwidth capacity of a firewall to handle the internet connection. We have 2000 devices in our network that use the internet. We handle users in and outside our network and see the logs of clients, internet connections, HTPs connections and VPN connections. Hence the solution can be improved to create the capability for larger bandwidths that support our business needs. Additionally, logging and reporting could be improved.

We have used this solution for three years.

We do not have experience with customer service and support as we can't access them in Iran, so we search for our questions on the internet and found answers. Online communities are a good resource for answers. Still, there are only a few websites or communities about the Carrier on YouTube and other websites. We find varying answers, so it is time-consuming since there are multiple sources of information.

The solution is easy to implement and can be installed in less than ten minutes.

The pricing is reasonable for the performance of the solution.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. The solution is good, but the logging and reporting systems can be improved.

For a small office, I'm using it for a firewall. This is the most obvious primary use, along with: 

• The Web Filter subscription for content that gives a bit of protection to users on the network when going to sites with known malware and so on. 
• The Antivirus module, which is good at scanning anything coming through, giving us a first line of defense. 
• Some other features in there, like VLAN. I have quite a few VLANs setup for keeping things separate for a build network and so on. 

I have the hardware appliance on-premise. However, I do use some of the features, like MyKerio cloud, for remote administration and backups. These are hosted on the Kerio site.

Knowing users on the network are confident that they are in a safe and secure network and can't really hurt themselves.

It's a combination of authentication, internal network DNS, filtering, and antivirus. It is a standalone product which has a lot of the features that a Windows domain might have. However, I don't need to have a whole lot of Windows or Mac infrastructure, as I can do all my network management from Kerio.

One very good thing about the Kerio device is its authentication. I don't have a Windows domain for authentication. Instead, I use the Kerio product because it can separate users by Mac addresses and give them IP addresses based on their usernames, automatically logging them in. This makes for a very simple authentication system.

The solution’s firewall and intrusion detection features are pretty good. I have, at different times, connected directly to the Internet in bridge modes with the modem, and the noise in the logs is phenomenal. So, it does a good job. I can see that the intrusion prevention catches everything that is coming at it. I tend to not use it in that mode. I have it connect to a port on my modem router, so I let the modem router take all the initial intrusion noise, then not much gets through to Kerio. That just gives me a lot of confidence that I have a secure network.

For the content filter, I am pretty much running their default. I haven't added any rules to that myself. The default does a pretty good job at picking up things. I might have whitelisted one or two things that I use which it tends to pick up, but I know they are okay.

Kerio Control gives us everything we need in one product. 

The feature that I'm relying on: If the appliance died and I had to get another one, Kerio has a configuration backup. Therefore, it's pretty easy to restore to a new appliance.

There are some pros and cons to its performance when dealing with malware and antivirus features. Maybe once a month, I have gone to a website and it's being blocked. This is because it's a known malware site. So, I feel confident that those filters are doing their job. On the down side, occasionally when iOS devices go to the App Store to do their application updates, it will pick that up as a possible virus in a file: a false positive. This only happens on the iOS updates and the antivirus signatures.

One area that confused me a bit when I was building my current network. I use VLANs to have separate functionality on the network, and the appliance I got was the WiFi model, but I discovered that you can't assign WiFi channels to the VLAN. So, you can have WiFi, but its own subnet. You can't run that over the VLAN. Effectively, I can't use the WiFi facility in the appliance and had to purchase a separate web that supports VLANs. In the end, I had to go to GFI support. They confirmed this is just a limited functionality of that device, as it is a low-end device. I don't know if any of their high-end models have a better facility or not.

I first used this solution when it was a piece of software called WinRoute. That would have been around the year 2000. I've been using the product in its various forms for quite a long time.

The stability is pretty good. It ticks along nicely. I occasionally have to reboot it. It starts throwing strange errors on different clients. There was a period where Kerio was releasing software updates at least once a month, which would force the reboot, but I think kept it pretty tidy. Over the last year, their updates haven't been very regular. When it gets to running for about 60 days or so, it does get a little funny and the reboot sorts it out. I don't know what's going on there and why their updates have slowed down.

A good thing with the Antivirus module is there are probably six or seven dozen updates every 24 hours to the antivirus signatures. Therefore, they do a pretty good job of keeping at the head of the game.

It is a very low-end device. I am using their base model appliance, so it's a very small piece of hardware with fairly low-end specs. Given the broadband connectivity that we have in Australia, which is pretty poor to start with, that's not really an impediment to me. Moving data around across the land and subnets seems to work fine. 

I have about three users most of the time and each of those users can have three devices. Then I have various servers and audio visual equipment. I'm probably up to about 20 or so IPs that could be used, but not everyone and everything is running at the same time. It seems to cope with the traffic I'm hitting it with.

Our users are mainly doing email, web browsing, a little bit of streaming, and a little bit of Zoom. There is not anything terribly intensive.

I probably utilize 70 percent of the features. I don't do things like VPN. I don't do anything with quotas, forcing people to log in, or bandwidth management. However, these are good features that would help some people.

I am not looking to increase usage at this stage. I know that if I did, it has those extra features that I could use. If I started pushing the performance, then I would need to upgrade to get some bigger hardware. I probably can't increase my usage too much at the moment because the hardware would max out.

To get one little unit and configure your whole network is good. It's also good too for a bigger business where you have a network and a small office somewhere. You could drop one of these in that office to run everything, as it's set and forget. You also have the remote administration of the appliance, which would be quite handy to a lot of businesses.

I found the technical support pretty good. They are very responsive and come back with an answer on things pretty quickly.

I have been using Kerio Control for quite a long time. I didn't use anything else previously.

It has a wizard to sort of get it up and running very quickly. I think I did start with that, then went into the manual configuration for setting up VLANs and DHCP scopes. They were fairly straightforward to set up. 

It's a product that you can get up and running pretty quickly. Then, if you want to get into advanced configuration, that's what takes a bit more time.

Out-of-the-box, I had something running in an hour or two, but that's probably because I've been using the product for quite a few years. I know what to look for. But as for the advanced configuration, that's days of work. It's ongoing with the administration and tuning the network. I spend maybe a couple of hours a month just making sure everything is configured and working correctly. The logs are pretty good too. It's good to keep an eye on the logs as it gives you an indication if anything's wrong or if things are going haywire.

You need to have a pretty good idea of how you want to structure unit work and what you want your network to do, especially when you want to set up things like authentication. You need to preplan your subnets and IP address ranges for different users so you can then map them to the user accounts. If you're going to a new organization and setting this up, then there is a bit of work in planning all that and what you want the device to do.

For deployment and maintenance, it takes me few hours here and there.

I have definitely seen ROI. It has saved in client software acquisitions, such as, antivirus or any dedicated security software. In my configuration, I haven't needed any Windows infrastructure because this device does all the network management for me. So, it has saved me from buying software and some amount of hardware. It gives three or four people antivirus, which is probably about $500 AUS a year just in client security software that I've saved. Plus, there are servers I haven't had to buy, which gets pretty expensive, especially with Windows licenses.

Kerio Control saves us time when it comes to managing security. Otherwise, I would have to invest in software running on clients, which get frustrating.

On the low-end device that I use, it has unlimited IP addresses. So, they have a subscription model where, on the higher models, you pay X dollars for 10 IP addresses. Then, if you want any more, you have to pay more on the model. On the low-end model, it has unlimited IP addresses, because if you have too many users, the thing will just slow you down and stop working. At some point, you need to say, "Okay, I've grown to a point where performance is impacted. I need to get some bigger hardware." If I get to that stage, I will possibly look at using one of the virtual appliances and putting it on some bigger hardware.

It gets expensive pretty quickly if you need to purchase license packs. In the previous model, I was buying packs of five. It was concurrent: If you had 10 address licenses, then you can have as many devices as you want, but if you hit 10 devices, you hit your license limit. People will get frustrated. They do appear to be expensive, but I don't have anything to really compare that against. I've not done any market evaluation for quite some time, because my model has unlimited addresses, so I haven't had to think about that.

The comprehensiveness of the security features this solution provides is the reason why I have stuck with them for so long. It has all the features that I need, and I haven't had to go and buy separate products. However, there are competing products that have a lot of these features in them. I did toy with the SonicWall product for a little while. SonicWall, who is a subsidiary of Dell EMC, offered an appliance, but it didn't do the internal network DNS nor was it good at authentication. I think the Kerio products are more rounded for running a small network out of a single appliance and not needing other infrastructure. SonicWall was frustrating because it didn't have a lot of the features that Kerio had.

SonicWall was my first foray into appliances. Up until that point I had been using the Kerio Control software edition. I liked the idea of appliances. If you're running something on a PC, you need to have a PC running, along with fans and hard drives spinning. Your appliances, even though they're lower spec hardware, are small and quiet. At the time, SonicWall was a fair bit cheaper, but that was how I discovered it was a false economy. It just didn't have the pool of features in it that Kerio had, so I would have needed to have a number of work arounds.

Looking at Cisco's documentation, they look a bit more complex to set up than Kerio Control.

The overall ease of use depends on your skill set. I have a networking background, so I find it okay. As you get into more advanced features, it's probably a bit technical, but I managed to find my way around it through the documentation to get things working. It has some good features in there, like you can create a firewall rule and the console lets you test that rule, which is helpful when you're trying to build a firewall rule.

One of the features that I haven't used yet is Kerio Control's high-availability/failover protection. However, it is something I would be interested in setting up in the future. We have started using it yet because we are small scale with a very small number of users.

Provides the simplicity of having a small appliance that you can rely on to configure. If someone wants a network that can be structured to keep things segregated and safe from each other, then it's a cost-effective device, which is easy enough to set up and configure.

I haven't had any security issues. However, back then, I would have been relying on an antivirus, running on clients, hoping that it would catch things.

I would rate it as a seven out of 10, but then I don't have a lot of experience with other products to compare it against. Though, from what I see and read, it's as good as anything out there. Everything is good. However, I'm a little bit concerned that I'm not getting a lot of updates. Probably if I needed more performance, it would get expensive fairly quickly.

Our biggest customer uses Kerio Control as a VPN on a campus network that we use to encrypt all of their heating and air. It's at the University of Mexico. It controls all of their heating, air, and security over their campus network. I have a hundred units doing that.

I'm a one-person team, and Kerio Control has saved me time. When I looked at the comparison between how much time I spend supporting a business installation of Kerio versus a FortiGate installation, just with the implementation, I have saved a few weeks of time. On a yearly basis, I have saved around 30 to 40 hours on one customer because they're bigger customers.

The VPN is the most valuable feature. We filter out outgoing NAT packets by port. So we locked down incoming and outgoing packets with the Kerio software. It's a lot less money than our FortiGate solutions that we installed, for instance. The value in it is money savings and flexibility.

Kerio is a lot clearer to set up to do particular things, whereas when I do it on a Cisco or a FortiGate I have to go fight with it per week sometimes to do something I can do in 20 minutes on Kerio.

For the money, the comprehensiveness of the security feature is exceptional. The next level of security is the sandbox and FortiGate charges me $120,000 a year for that sandbox. I don't see that as something that Kerio would ever be adding. The next step is a big, drastic step up in company size. So for medium and small businesses, I think Kerio is about as good as I can get.

It gives us everything we need in one product for our small-size business.

For medium to small businesses, the firewall and intrusion detection features are very well priced and just excellent. The functionality for the amount that we're paying for them is excellent.

The malware and antivirus features are okay. I add stuff on top of Kerio, I have Malwarebytes. So I would give it an okay. Malwarebytes still catches quite a bit that Kerio doesn't.

I used the content filtering a little bit and it works alright. I've got a hundred VPNs at the University of New Mexico. I don't put it anywhere else though, so I don't know. I don't really have any kind of input on that, I suppose.

Their graphical user interface that allows me to open up particular ports to particular internal IPs with one external IP is very flexible and easy to use. It is also much clearer than when I go into my larger systems with two competitors, Cisco and FortiGate.

Kerio enables me to use one external IP address to cut it into multiples server solutions based on different port numbers. It saves them money if my customers are creative enough to use those features.

The overall speed needs improvement. Internet connectivity speed needs to be improved somehow.

If I buy one of Kerio's hardware boxes and put it between me and the Internet, the speed is reduced dramatically using their hardware.

I have been using Kerio Control for the last twenty years. 

We currently have one on Macintosh and one on Windows of the most current version of Kerio Control as well as Kerio Connect.

I found it to be fairly stable. Their updates have gone very smoothly, which is a nice thing. It doesn't crash during updates. I've had very good luck with that. Whereas I can't say the same thing with both Cisco and FortiGate.

If you buy their hardware box, it doesn't scale so nicely. I found if I put it on a higher-end computer, it does better. I guess it's okay if you put the right hardware in for it. I can't get through those to their boxes.

I had some customers that were running about 200 to 300 machines, those were my larger ones with Kerio. For the most part, I have them on between five and 20 users.

One of my customers had some issues that weren't pleasant. Support was pretty good and then it changed quite a bit when Lifeboat and GFI were involved. I personally haven't done too bad. I'm a one-person show, but I have a bunch of subcontractors. I personally have done alright with them. Although some of my people have had some not as good experiences over the last six months. They had time-related issues, about how long it took them to get back to them.

On average, it takes around one to two hours on a small to medium business to set it up. But it's totally dependent on their applications and that can vary up to quite a few hours if they've got some complex application issues. Typically, it's because I have to wait on getting responses from vendors. So we go out and we put in a default setup and modify off of that.

Our default setup pretty much locks their network up to only having HTTP, it turns off FTP and things of that nature. We have a pretty secure default setup and then we go open things.

After you've done it a few times it's pretty smooth.

Our ROI is money savings. We bill them every year for their renewal subscriptions, and that goes fairly smoothly. We don't have to spend a whole lot of time trying to figure out how to add a particular port or interface for a new function that the client needs to have access to. They never need the Internet. It takes us considerably less time to do it on Kerio than it does on the competing products that we also deal with. Which, from our perspective, is appropriate. For some people, it would be a mixed blessing because you are not getting as much billable time out of it, but we like to be as efficient as possible and so we appreciate that. We feel it's a good return on investment.

I think that licensing flows pretty smoothly. Make sure that you set them up so you support them over the my.kerio.com web interface because that lets you see all of your customers.

We don't use high availability or fail-over protection. We set one up once and almost gave up on it. You have to have pinnacle boxes and things, so we did set it up and test it but we haven't actually sold any of them.

I feel pretty comfortable having a Kerio firewall in a medium to small business. It can be deployed in an easy fashion, which is the same as everybody's Comcast, CenturyLink, or whatever their modem has. Then if you really spend the time doing it correctly, you can give somebody what, I feel, is an enterprise-quality solution in small business for a good price.

If I pinhole Kerio for small businesses, I would rate it a 10 out of ten but overall, I would give it a seven.

We use the solution mainly as a firewall. 

I am impressed with the tool's firewall filtering capacity. 

The product's technical support is not good as it used to be. 

I have been working with the product for 15 years. 

The tool's stability is great. 

The solution is scalable. 

The product's setup is straightforward. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. 

We mainly use Kerio Control for the phone systems. We use it like a VPN network so that I and a couple other guys can take our computers home and work from home. That's a great feature. We love that because you can sign in at home and be like you're in the store.

We have five locations and, for the person who controls it we have it set up in our main office. The ease of access, of being able to change a voice message, it links to that. The person who controls it can approve it and then she just plays it. That's great for when we have to do a holiday message or special events are happening. We love that feature. 

I love the VPN that we set up. A few of us have it on our computers so that if we leave, we can still access the stores. And we can work from home if needed. When I sign into that Kerio VPN, it links me like I'm sitting in the store. It puts me in our secure network so that I can sign on to each individual store and I can run numbers. We work through ICS Vision for our stores. We have a corporate plus five stores and it lets me link to all that. If I have to work from home, it's so much faster than the way we used to do it. It saves me a couple hours of each time I use it from home. It also saves me from having to drive in.

It's the overall ease of everything. It seems to have pretty seamless connectivity for linking our stores.

Also, the firewall and intrusion detection features seem to keep people out of our servers. I know it's a little bit of a process to try to link something new into it because the firewall is very secure, but we haven't had any issues with malware attacks on our end so it must be stopping them.

We haven't really had any major issues. But when we did our last update, we had some trouble with the initial syncing process to get our messaging to go through. But we were also moving a store and a lot was changing during that process. I don't think it was on Kerio's end. It just coincided with the update. Once we got our third-party IT guy involved it was resolved very quickly.

We have been using Kerio Control for about six years.

The stability has been fine. We have no concerns or complaints.

In terms of increasing usage, that's going to end up being discussed in a meeting with our IT guy to see what capabilities it has, how we could expand it, how we could grow with it, and how it could help out day-to-day business.

I've been with the company a little over three years now, but when I came in as general manager it was already in use. The upgrade is the closest that I've been to a deployment.

From start to finish, when doing the upgrade, we were back up in an hour, including the issue we had. Our IT guy let us know what was going on and that there was a series of events he had to do and he did them and we were good to go.

From the old way we used to do things, it's night and day. Before the company brought this on, it was pretty old-school in how it did its phone systems and messaging. The efficiency has doubled, but the company also used to use answering machines way back when.

I've never seen any additional costs incurred or involved, other than the initial.

The biggest lesson from using Kerio Control is the untapped potential there is to link to everything and streamline our business. That's really what it's about for us. Obviously, there's more out there for us to do with it.

As an SMB, Kerio Control is a good fit for our environment. It serves what we need done. I would recommend it for a smaller business because the ease of use and the access it allows us are great.

I use Kerio Control because it is one of the few firewalls which allows easy failover from two separate internet providers. It also has virus protection built-in. I use it to have reliable access to the internet, which is virus-free and which fails over if one of my internet providers drops — and they do sometimes when it rains. Those were the reasons I wanted Kerio Control. And it just works; provides internet.

We are a very small company, and started with two users. We have now four users who use it on and off. There are nine or 10 computers. I, myself have three or four computers working at the same time. I'm not really dependent on cloud, but I use internet very much in a lot of situations.

It's deployed onsite but as a virtual machine in a Windows server.

Being an SMB, Kerio Control is nice-to-have. It fulfills my needs completely. 

It allows the users I have to use email without any problem, without their having to know anything about the fact that there is a firewall which protects them in different ways. I might spend an hour per month on maintenance of the Kerio system. So it's very transparent and very hidden. The best thing is the fact that nobody notices it.

It has helped me save time. It allows me to get on with my main work, without spending any time on security or worrying about threats to the data I have. Without it, I would have lost a lot of time. A long time ago, I spent a lot of time cleaning computers, removing viruses, etc. That has all gone away since I have had this set up, as part of a three-layer defense.

The failover has no effect on security. It only affects the availability. There used to be a situation where I had two internet providers with different speeds. If my main provider was down, it would be backed up by the other and I wouldn't notice that it was a little slower, and I wouldn't notice that one of my internet providers was unavailable. This guarantees that I always have internet availability. We had some technical problems with one of the lines which was very sensitive to rain — which sounds weird, but okay. And this setup allowed me to not think about it anymore. Since then, internet speeds have grown and at the moment it's not a big issue, but I'm sure that both of the providers drop once a year for a day. But I don't notice it, and that's very important for me.

The most valuable features include 

• being able to attach to two different internet providers
• the ability to map which ports you will allow in and out of the VPN, which is built-in 
• the fact that it reliably works without any attention.

I want to have access to my computer from the outside and Kerio Control plays a role because it has a VPN. This VPN is different from most other VPNs, although they have used a standard version. It is more reliable because it's a smaller group of computers to target for hackers and the like. The VPN works very well. I use it to work remotely very easily and exchange information, both to and from the location where it's deployed, and there have been no problems there.

I have one or two VPN clients, at most, that are active at one time, so it's there if needed when I'm not working at this location. It helps me a lot to have a reliable VPN client. I have no performance issues when working through VPN.

Kerio Control also has some authorizations so I am able to block internet access for certain hours for certain people.

Overall, the security features are adequate. They do what I need. I don't have much experience with anything else, so I can't compare, but they completely solved my problems.

The firewall and intrusion detection features don't hinder me, and I haven't had any attacks, as far as I can see. I want a firewall to be unobtrusive. I don't want to notice it's there. It should just do its work and protect me and not hinder me when doing real work, and that's what it does. It's very good because it shouldn't be noticed, and it's good at not being noticed and doing its work.

Overall, I don't have any problem using Kerio Control. For me, it's very easy, but I've been working in software for some 50 years.

I would like to be able to automatically send email from Kerio Control and have it tell me what my external IPs are, because on one of my lines I have a fixed IP address and on the other it is variable. If there were a permanent way for me to figure out, "Okay, my current external VPN and my firm IP is this," it would help. I need to know the IP address to connect with the VPN and, at the moment, one of the lines sometimes changes its IP address without me knowing it. It's a hassle to figure out what it is.

It might also be interesting to have a GFI-approved, Docker-containerized version of the Kerio Control system.

I have been using Kerio Control for more than 10 years.

I don't remember any glitches. I haven't had problems with it for a very long time. But I use it very specifically for a certain purpose and that works fine.

It's very hard for me to give a correct estimate of the scalability, since a lot of overhead in my situation is caused by the fact that I run it in a virtual machine. That means the bandwidth which it can process, which would be scalable, is downgraded because it's in a virtual machine. That's not Kerio's fault.

I have no plans to increase the usage in the future. For me, it's adequate because I have a lot of leeway. I have enough bandwidth available to fulfill my needs.

The problems I've had with Kerio, when I wanted to change something, have always been solved by consulting the Knowledge Base.

We are located in Holland and there is supposed to be Dutch tech support, and there is an American tech support, as far as I know. The bad thing about the American tech support is that reaching them by phone is difficult and by mail there's a certain turnaround. So, I'd rather rely on the Knowledge Base so that I'm not really dependent on the person on the other side.

They have an extensive Knowledge Base and, if you can't find something there, you can check the internet and there's enough available.

I switched because I wanted something which had the possibility to handle two different internet providers, two network cards, and do load switching and load balancing. The other solution I used didn't have that.

The initial setup is easy. I know what I want to configure so it's easy, no problem at all. 

The biggest problem I have is using it as a container on a virtual machine. You have to connect your hardware network cards to the internal virtual machine. That's a problem that Kerio won't be able to solve because it's the environment I have to create to let Kerio work in the way I work, and that is probably different than most users. But if you use it on a simple PC, it's no problem at all.

I reinstalled it recently and it took me about half an hour, and part of that was getting backups right, etc.

As for an implementation strategy, I changed the system my Kerio was installed on, so I first did a trial-install to figure out if everything worked. After that, when I did the actual production install, it was done very fast because I had tried it out before.

It does its job. Converted into hours, it doesn't cost more than five hours per year to pay the price for the 10 users I have. That's a good deal for me.

Having good internet access is a very large requirement for me to do my work. Internet is one of the basic tools I have and I need a firewall. Your internet provider will give you a box that has a simple firewall in it, but that doesn't suffice for me. I need something like this and it's not an option for me not to buy a product like this. I'm really not even thinking of return on investment. If I don't have something like this, I just can't work. It's a basic necessity.

I don't think it's expensive. I'd recommend it to others.

I haven't evaluated any other options. I started using Kerio Control and it was sufficient. I haven't spent any time looking at alternatives. I've seen constant improvements in Kerio; they actively enhance the product. That's a good sign for me. I also use the GFI mail server and I prefer to use one company for my tools.

My general advice is always: Read the manual, check your hardware and see if you have everything you need, and if it will suit your needs.

It's hard for me to assess its malware and antivirus protection because Kerio is one part of a three-part defense against malware and antivirus. I'm not sure which part picks up which problem. My philosophy is that no single protocol picks up all the problems, so if you have several of them, you'll fight the virus or malware at some point. That's why I have three different tools with different focus points, and together they keep me safe. Malwarebytes specializes more in malware, ESET is a normal desktop antivirus system, and this system is a general anti-malware and antivirus system of another type. They compliment each other.

I have an internet speed of 200 megabits per second, and 15 might be enough. So the only point I don't know about Kerio is whether it takes a lot of performance out of the maximum you could get if you didn't have a firewall.

Overall, I would give it a nine out of ten, but with the comment that I haven't compared it with anything else. On my scale, 10s are very rare. They're for things that go beyond my expectations and Kerio does exactly what I expect and it does it well.

It's just an essential which does it's work. I don't think about it normally. It's just there and it works.

My primary use case is to route traffic and route our multiple Internet interfaces. It routes all of the outbound Internet traffic, none of the internal. I do apply a content filter as well to make sure people aren't going into places that they shouldn't be. We have some traffic rules setup for certain services, blocking certain IP ranges from getting external access as well. We do the same for the Adelaide office, but our South Coast office, in addition to all of that, we also run DSCP off of it. The South Coast is the only place we use the DSCP on Kerio.

Now that we're both running fiber connections between Sydney and Adelaide, I can access our document server in Adelaide just from my PC, rather than using something like TeamViewer and transferring the file I'm after via TeamViewer from Adelaide. I get to it not much slower than the internal server we have right now. It's fantastic.

The routing of the multiple Internet physical routers I have is the most valuable feature of this solution. Instead of me physically unplugging a cable from one router to the server, if one connection goes down, it automatically switches for me. So I can have all three of them plugged in. If one goes down, it just picks up the other one automatically. There's no physical cable swapping.

In terms of ease of use, it's pretty easy. It took some playing around for me to understand some of it, but I'd say if you understand what it is you're after, and how that works, then this is pretty easy.

We use the firewall. It's fine, a bit tough. I need to test it against others. I'd rather use the Kerio firewall than the Windows ones.

With the VPN features we can connect all three of our sites together.

The content filtering and VPN features are pretty easy to set up. It's a couple of clicks and it's done, so it's pretty good. I'm pretty happy with it.

I am the only manager who manages the security. It does save me time. In the scenario where one Internet connection goes down, I used to have to run to the server room and unplug a cable, and come back. Now, I don't have to do that at all. It saves me a lot of time, 100%. With the routing, previous to this there are a few things in here that I haven't had the ability to really do how I wanted so I don't have a comparison.

I would like it if the interface section had multiple failovers. Although I do have three connections, just in case our physical cables get disconnected, I can only set up one failover as a backup. So, if for some reason our fiber and our AFM went down together, I would have to have it search for our 4G modem. I'd love to have extra backups running.

Someone set a printer to have a static IP address and because they set it as static, it won't show on my LAN, on the DSCP server, because it's not questioning it. So just because the device does not request the rules from the DSCP, I don't see why it wouldn't show up in my LAN on the DSCP server. That's a bit odd. It's different from how a Windows DSCP server would react. Instead of only showing one is requesting DSCP, or on a reservation, it shows all, whether they're reserved or not. A Windows one would. For some reason, it isn't showing me ones that were statically assigned.

I have been using Kerio Control for four to five years. 

It's deployed in three different locations now. 

The stability is pretty good. I've only had one issue with it before. It was set to update on its own, and it didn't update and the update failed, so it didn't come back on for some reason.

If an update fails, it should have some kind of automatic rollback to bring itself back on. Because when it does that at night and it stops, I don't really get a notification that it's stopped. It's not on anymore so I don't find out that nothing has worked all evening until the next morning.

Scalability is fantastic. I don't see a limit to it.

I am the only admin for this solution.  

We employ a company that contracts stuff out for me, so they're the people that initially installed this for me at the three sites, but I maintain it. If I have other things I don't know how to do, they'll get in, but it's just me and that other team.

Increasing usage depends on whether the business itself acquires other businesses, and that's really why we've got these three locations. We bought a business in Adelaide, so we set up a similar setup to what we had in Sydney. And this year in February we bought another business down in the South Coast of New South Wales and we've set up a similar thing there as well. So if we buy other businesses and I need some other help with the server running, then yes, I'll probably get another license. But only if that happens.

My business is medium-sized and this solution is perfect for it. 

I have one point of access for multiple portions of what I need for routing. We've got an Internal server that's managed by a different company and it was incredibly easy for that other company to put certain rules in place and then for us to create those rules to and communicate to the outside world was incredibly easy to map. There was just no confusion between the two companies that we're talking about what to map. That was in the initial setup, so that all wasn't done by me. They just communicated to each other very easily. This made it very simple. There was no confusion.

I've never contacted technical support because I just call the people that I contract to fix things and if they're not quite sure how to fix something, they'd probably contact GFI. 

We used to use a Cisco router. That was it. There was a very limited amount of routing I could really perform.

Kerio Control enables us to add multiple routing. We have lots of different options in the one thing. 

Kerio was recommended to me by ITIS. They told me that this one was what they highly recommended we use for what I needed.

The outsourced contractor that we used for the setup was great. There's nothing wrong. I've been using him for a while.

I can't imagine not using it. I think if I had to use the Microsoft server to do all of this I'd be very frustrated.

I don't have other ones to compare the pricing to. I haven't used other solutions to know all the features they have. The price seems reasonable to me for something that does so much and works so well.

Kerio Control has not increased the number of VPN clients but we have added clients only because they needed it, not because Kerio is there.

To the best of my knowledge, before Kerio we did not experience a security breach. The only semi security issue we had was that someone had run a virus that encrypted a whole bunch of files on the server. But that was before my time. I was not the IT manager at that point.

If I didn't have the help from someone else that completely understood all of the services that are features of this product, then I probably wouldn't have put it in myself. It's definitely more advanced for people that are handling this type of networking day to day, which I don't. The only other thing that I've had a problem with is Apple servers for some reason, because Apple services come through on so many different servers themselves, and different destinations on the Internet, there's always some kind of issue with updating them on the network with Kerio running. I don't know why. It's just Apple. Everything else is fine.

Personally, I've just learned how to route traffic over a network well. It's helped me to route different parts of the Internet to different parts of my network, which I can't do on a Window server, and visually it's been a great help.

It's been able to add multiple Interfaces, it's good. I have multiple Internet streams and a failover. That's the best.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.