KerioControl Benefits

AD
IT Manager at Flare Technologies

The way it improves the way our company functions is through the VPN, because we offer support services. Normally, we would have to rely on TeamViewer to a computer on board, or to get on the phone and tell somebody to take pictures or press buttons, where we can't see what's going on. 

In the last year or two, after setting up the VPN, any of our guys can log straight in to the system and they are effectively on board. That is a big help because our customers are all over the world. They could be in Ibiza one day, but then they're heading to the South of France and then they're going off to Greece or crossing the Atlantic. Sometimes it's difficult to send somebody out to them quickly. They might not want to pay for somebody to come out. It could be two or three days of round-trip travel for a half-hour job. The VPN makes it more efficient. We can jump in and see what's going on. We can mimic our engineer's being on board the vessel via the VPN. That's the biggest benefit. And it's instant. Someone rings me up and I've got a single VPN connection and I can get to their networks.

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AD
EMP Specialist at Global EPM BV

Where previously users were connecting via exotic firewall systems with no certificates on them, Kerio Control can be used with the certificates of the customer so that customers can also see that their connections are being properly secured on the sites that they are using. That helps them identify their sites and to distinguish their connection from other connections.

The solution has increased the number of VPN clients extended to those outside our environment. All our clients that we need to visit have a VPN solution. And the ones that we host in the data center are only accessible by a VPN client.

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BC
Information Security Officer - VP at Unified Technology Solutions

It does antivirus, malware, and ransomware. We feel the coverage is complete across the entire spectrum of malware, viruses, and most ransomware. It also covers some types of adware, which is an unwanted program that's not necessarily bad, but there's no reason to have it.

We have a lot of other companies that were multi-site companies which had servers at different sites not talking to each other. They had remote workers or maybe they were using open RDP as their access to their internal network. These customers were getting ransomware infections and constantly just getting frustrated not being able to share resources between sites and this gives them the capability. I have a lot of customers, especially in the non-profit market, where we've had a lot of success deploying the solution. 

A lot of the non-profits also have open WiFi and the filtering tools have been great for making sure that the WiFi bandwidth isn't drained by somebody sitting there and just surfing videos. We can control the open WiFi and we can control public computers to make sure that they stay just on the sites that we want them to stay on, e.g., employment sites, training, etc. So, it's been really helpful for the non-profits.

If a tech has a basic understanding of firewalls, NATing, and security, it is amazing how quick we can teach them how to use the product to its full capabilities. We can take a half day to a day and a brand new tech who's never seen the product can pretty much understand it enough to set it up, work with a customer, and make changes that a customer requests. There's nothing better than a customer calling and saying, "We need to add this site," and instead of saying, "Well, let me open a ticket and get an engineer to look at the thing," we go, "One second," and, through the MyKerio portal, find their firewall, remote into it, make the change, and say, "Okay, test it now. Works? Perfect." Hang up the phone and we are done.

With COVID-19 and everything that has happened, customers would call us up and say, "We're shutting down. Friday's our last day. Everybody is going to work from home." In 24 hours, we could have them all working remotely. The amount of time and simplicity of getting users set up with the VPN allowed us to get massive numbers of users working remotely at businesses that had never even considered remote work as a possibility. Or, maybe the owner had a little bit of remote capability, but that was it. Just through the ease of and the free VPN client it was amazing how quickly we could roll out VPN to everybody, we had whole companies remotely working overnight.

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Buyer's Guide
Firewalls
March 2024
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LB
IT & Installations Manager at Odyssey Gaming

The main example of how Kerio has improved my organization would be through the COVID shutdown in terms of just being able to scale. It scales very easily to users that weren't normally remote workers. The fact that it scales well at very little trouble to scale with the amount of users on there, and then to have no issues over that period with increased usage, it did the job. The less I know about it, the better it's doing.

It has saved a lot of time and it was a secure way of doing it too. We had a whole contact center that worked from home for a period of time and that's a 21 hour a day contact center that we moved, that was spread out across the greater Brisbane region and working on home internet connections. Surprisingly, we didn't have a lot of stability issues anyway on those connections, but Kerio didn't blink, so that was good.

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JB
IT Support at Rural Computer Consultants, Inc

Content filtering used to be that you had to block specific websites that you didn't want somebody to access, or you had to write a specific rule to say that something is accessible or not accessible. We can apply Kerio-provided categories and rules without having to define large scopes of protocols or malicious websites. That part of it has come a long way in the last five to ten years.

The GUI is the best part of the product. If another team member needs to get in there to do something, it's a really quick click and it's done. There's no learning through command-line tools.

On an annual basis, we save not just hundreds of hours but also labor costs. Over the life of the product, I'm sure it's in the tens of thousands of hours because we don't need an inhouse specialist in Kerio technology.


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FR
Owner at Fr@nkonnections

Most customers are not able to understand the technology behind it. I am always trying to explain it to my customers. When I show my customers the interface of Kerio Control and all the reporting features along with the security features within the logging, they're very impressed. I have a very good relationship with my customers because this is mostly based on trust. I show them, and if they have doubts, I always say, "Just hire somebody to check my work." For example, a year and half ago in the travel industry, there were new rules for travel agencies who give out credit cards that they must comply with PCI DSS standards. There were some things that had to be adjusted and Kerio was able to adjust for that. So, it met the demands of PCI DSS standards.

When one of the employees of my customers was using a VPN Client, I created it so they will always get a message. When the VPN Client connects to Kerio Control from the outside, they will get an email so they know when they are connected and when they are disconnected what is happening to their network. I can, as an administrator, look in the logging and see what's happening. If I really wanted to manage what is happening over a month, then I could go deeply within Kerio Control and make a text file of the logging. I could then order an export to Excel to give the customer an impression of what is happening.

Our customers don't want to worry about their IP. If it's implemented well, Kerio Control is very good product for this.

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GR
ICT Consultant at D-R Consulting Pty Ltd

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

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CK
CEO at Professional Project Managers

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.

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HP
Owner at Multi Level Software

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.

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Mark Spiteri - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at JB Metropolitan Distributors

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.

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it_user219912 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastucture - Cloud Admin at Primary S.A.

We had several routers in our environment, including Linux firewalls and Cisco PIX for user and site-to-site VPN connections, all of them were replaced by Kerio Control. The improvement was instant as now we have a better overview of all our internet connections and LAN-to-LAN connections. We even have a better control of our site-to-site VPN tunnels.

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BC
CEO at a computer software company with 1-10 employees

We have several offices in different provinces across Canada and because of that, the connection has been very secure and reliable. We haven't had any downtime with it other than when we had the NG100 fail. Other than that, it's made the connection to our websites, our office, and our eCommerce sites all very reliable. That's been very important.

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MG
VP Engineering & Admin at E Cubed Systems Sl

The single largest component was the introduction of MyKerio and the ability to be able to remotely connect the challenge that we have with MyKerio. By yacht, I'm referring to the 1% of the 1% of the people that are out there with $50 million to $60 million yachts. They have satellite systems on board so one of the challenges that we have with MyKerio is the sensitivity to latency. What that means is that if you're on a landline like a DSL or a cellular connection, your ping time may be 20 milliseconds, but with satellite, because of the distances involved, those ping times could be 700 to even 1,100 milliseconds. This is a challenge that we have because just about any application or hardware device that is out in the market is not really designed to take that into account.

In this particular case, if we have a boat that is traveling from South Florida down to the Caribbean and the entire boat is on satellite and we need to be able to log into MyKerio for the boat, it's not optimized or set up for satellite communication. It sometimes becomes problematic in trying to connect to the vessel. Where if the entire boat, like on 4G or landline, then it's no big deal because MyKerio is optimized for that. 

That would be an area for improvement, but the benefit of it is that we can handle issues remotely. The other benefit is through a minimal amount of instruction to the boat, they can complete what I would refer to as basic tasks.

For example, if a boat is down in the Bahamas and the owner is on board, we typically have these in cellular and a landline connection and then on top of that, we'll have an owner, the crew, and guests. So in this particular case, we would want the owner on the fastest 4G connection. Then we would want to put the crew on the satellite connection, which may not be as fast. So it's just about optimizing the experience for the owner and being able to control the bandwidth.

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FL
Solutions Architect at Clockwork Solutions

Its primary job is to protect us and give us a degree of comfort. We're putting a lot of effort into creating a financial trading system. We want some comfort that it's secure behind the quality firewall and that's really what beckoned its purchase. The fact that we've not had any issue indicates that it must be doing that job reasonably well, and the fact that we don't get any of those attempted attacks from the block in China, because of geo-blocking, is probably the strongest feature for us. I wouldn't say it improves what we do because it doesn't affect what we do. It's really just security.  It's a tool to improve our security profile for what we do.

We don't expose our remote desktop connected servers to the internet anymore. But when we did have that, because the security log is a really easy thing to set up, it would show you all the attempted, brute force attacks. That's now down to zero. We don't get any brute force attacks, but at the same time, we don't expose the Port 3389 out to the internet. We could achieve the same result with a domestic firewall in a domestic router. However, this gives us a degree of comfort that we can actually analyze any traffic that looks a bit suspicious, inbound, or outbound. That's a definite step change compared to what we'd have in an out-of-the-box type of router.

Security is there to slow things down and make things a bit tricky. That's its bottom line. If security is easy, it's probably being done wrong.

Certainly in the first few months of using it, it was quite time-consuming to get a configuration working that was reliable. Because I work from home, I originally had it protecting everything coming in and out of the home which didn't work well at all. It's protecting the home office and the server environment. Everything else just goes straight out of the domestic router out to the internet because we've got IPTV, with kids on devices. They don't need such a high level of protection. It would be nice to give them that because if you've got this perimeter that's protected by a really good quality product, you want to protect everything.  But when we tried that, it seemed to struggle with the high volume of traffic that was being generated by the IP cameras, the IPTV service, and the myriad of devices and iPads that we have in the house. So we stopped using it for that purpose.

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JP
President at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

Instead of using a cloud-based product for accessing information, and putting my data at risk in the cloud and in someone else's hands, it has allowed me to use a VPN and access my data directly from a laptop when I am out in the field. That has made my life a lot easier, where I'm able to access any information I need to be able access, basically on demand, with an Internet connection. That alone has been great.

The solution has increased the number of VPN clients extended to those outside my environment by 30 percent. 

My clients are pretty lax about the content filter, but it works well. For the most part, they want to keep their employees pretty happy. Therefore, they are not too strict about what they are viewing. Obviously, they don't want them surfing any adult sites or anything like that. But, for the most part, they do allow shopping at work and things like that. They're more relaxed about it, to a certain degree.

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TB
Owner at LOTUSCONCEPT

This solution has improved my organization because we can access remotely. With Kerio Control, we can remotely control systems to be installed in multiple areas. The remote connection is valuable for us.

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CB
Account Manager (Technical) at Redfortress Ltd

It has saved time for the members of our team who manage security, because everything can be done from the Kerio. If a problem arises or something needs changing, we can just put it into the same rule that we already have or make a new rule, a duplicated rule, which is quite easy  to do.

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JG
Head of IT at Glorious Way Church

We were having issues with feeling more secure. Keio Control has made me feel like our network is more secure. Also, the VPN feature was easier to manage and assign to different users. There's no more downtime with our VPN. It just works.

Kerio Control has saved time for the members of our team who manage security.

We've increased the amount of clients that use VPN. It's very easy to manage and very easy to setup. All we have to do is set them up with an account and then download the software to their computer. It just works. There has been a 50% increase.

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Timur Assembayev - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Specialist at Wattum

There were some issues with our main firewall and it went down. In a short time, I deployed KerioControl and save our business.

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RA
Owner at L3GNL LLC

It has improved my organization because I am able to back the mail server through the tunnel to my house. All the video cameras at the store get copied and backed up to my house as well. For example, if I had a break-in and someone took the video server, I would still have copies of all the videos.

Kerio has saved time for those who manage security. It notifies me whenever there's a problem or when something goes wrong so we don't have to constantly watch the screen. It saves us 20 to 30 man-hours a week. 

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MZ
Telecommunications Engineer at FARNAIT

Kerio Control has helped my organization by hiding my private IP address behind the firewall and we use the proxy destination instead of my website.

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QS
Senior Sales Technician at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It helped a lot with the bandwidth because a lot of our clients complained that the Internet was really slow, then we found it's a Windows update or some guy inside the company using YouTube. With Kerio Control, we found out what was going on, blocked it, or pushed it down.

It helps the IT manager monitor their staff. As for the servers, it gives protection from the outside. Their intrusion protection works extremely well, so you can see if there are issues from outside in the log files. The whole system is just easy to read.

Right before the lockdown, we got requests for home connections like crazy from customers. We put all of them onto Kerio VPN, which is much easier for them. They log onto Kerio VPN and can see their local drives and servers, then they can work.

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OK
IT Support Professional at Valley IT Support, Inc

This solution gives me confidence in the ability to quickly recover from hardware failures.

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AS
System Administrator Team Lead | Developer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

It has made it easier for us and our employees to manage and add settings to the firewall, as opposed to another brand where you have to use command-line or really complicated layouts. The ease of use is a big plus.

The solution has also saved us a lot of time in managing security. We have to adjust the content rules and now we have one place where we can enter them. We have a customer with about 20 Kerio Controls and we don't have to set all the rules on each firewall. When we have to add some rules to each of the firewalls, it can be done within one minute. Normally, it would take 20 to 30 minutes, depending on if they're all online — and we would have to check them manually. Now, we just have to enter them and, when they come online, they sync with the global rule sets.

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RB
Owner at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

The VPN connections have improved my organization. It also means that I can manage security more easily.

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RK
Technical Director at EVAK Technologies Limited

Kerio Control protects our email servers. The product provides a pre-filter to scan the email messages before they get to the email servers.

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DH
General Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The statistic feature enables us to better use bandwidth management. We monitored the use by mobile, type of application, department, and by users. The bandwidth was solid. Our internet speed is optimized for our research.

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TO
Chief Information Officer at NETmodel Tech Ltd

It prevents people from visiting undesirable sites and ensures that they use the internet for their designated jobs.

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RA
Works at GVC

It has helped our organization with testing.                                

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AK
ICT Manager at MEDS

The Kerio Product has come in handy in the area of Firewall management. Having visibility into the entire Organization through a dashboard. 

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CC
Chief of Technical Department at Ingenieria e Informática Asociada Ltda.

It provides security to the internal network and implements solutions through VPN to access specific internal services, without the need to open the network completely. The usage capacity of Kerio Control is enormous.

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KN
MD at Comsque

1. It decreased malware attacks in our network.

2. It improved employee productivity and data security.

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RW
Computer Technician at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

This is a service that we set up for the yacht owners. They all want to carry the control over the yacht.

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it_user784197 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Coordinator / Pointe-Noire Branch, BUROTOP IRIS SA at BUROTOP IRIS SA

Kerio has improved my organization's security.

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CC
Chief of Technical Department at Ingenieria e Informática Asociada Ltda.

It helps us better control internal and external communications.

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Buyer's Guide
Firewalls
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about GFI, Netgate, Fortinet and others in Firewalls. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.