We have a mix. A lot of our customers are just building or starting to manage thier network, so this is their first new product that didn't come from an office store. We also have some that were replacing an existing product either because the product got old and it was time to replace it, or sometimes because we've seen issues with other products we know this will fix. For one product in particular, we will see point-to-point VPN instability sometimes that customers have been dealing with years. We'll say, "Hey, let us put this in. Chances are it's going to clear up." Usually, it does. One customer had a point-to-point VPN with a that product that would go down almost every day. Now, the point-to-points have been up for about five months straight. This shows how reliable the solution is. 

For other customers, sometimes we'll replace another product because they got oversold. They'll have some very large product that's really expensive, and we're like, "Hey, that's cool. It does a ton of neat things you don't even need. But this product will do pretty much all the same things, especially all the things you currently use as well as give you some capability to grow into." A lot of customers didn't realize they need VPNs until all of a sudden they grow. There is nothing worse than telling a customer, "Remember when you saved a couple hundred bucks a year ago. Well, that's all gone now because the product you chose doesn't support this." That's what we like about this solution. It is priced low enough for entry-level, but it has the power to grow with a company without them having to replace it.

Sophos Firewall is very similar to KerioControl. I use Sophos Firewall in some networks and KerioControl in other networks. Sophos Firewall is better than KerioControl. KerioControl is very easy and useful to set up and manage, whereas Sophos Firewall is more professional. It is a bit difficult to manage users with Sophos Firewall compared to KerioControl.

We have used SonicWall and I've also used Ubiquiti around the place a little bit, but nothing on a production level. We've played around with Ubiquiti internally. We used to implement SonicWall at our customers to do some deep-end firewalling on their gear but now we're mostly using Kerio devices at the moment in the field as well.

Our systems supplier became our sister company. We got bought and converged in a vertical integration, and then we got divested again. We checked the systems, and the staff from our sister company got taken away to our opposition company. SonicWall was something that we inherited and we weren't really familiar with its use. I was familiar with Kerio's configuration, so we moved to a Kerio device to do the same job.

I did not have any experience with another similar solution. In fact, I had never heard of Kerio until I started at my company, primarily because Kerio was fairly small at the time. They were based out of California at the time. They were a small company and generally fit into the 100-users-or-less environment. When you would hear about other vendors, they generally ran in the thousands to tens of thousands of users and you just didn't hear about Kerio in that product line.

We take other solutions into consideration based on the growth needs that we have. As our cloud environment gets larger, if the Kerio technology is not able to keep up, that's always under consideration.

I have worked with all the firewall systems, like Cisco. I see how people struggle of with it and also how much effort it takes to maintain it and implement rules. Kerio did a very good job with that. You can also, in a quick way, see inbound and outbound traffic and make your own filters.

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

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.

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.

We had a mix of Linux IPtables and Cisco appliances. We switched because the business needs a quicker and more precise response from IT.. Now, with a clicks, we can see everything.

I've previously come across Barracuda. I've spoken to the team there. In terms of meeting our needs, I've found that, with a lot of other products, it's very modular. Kerio tends to keep everything in-house. Due to that, there are certain functionalities that I prefer to have with Kerio as opposed to other solutions.

We previously used SonicWall. We were looking for something that was really rock solid. We had a very bad experience with SonicWall and their support was very bad. We had a client that was down and they couldn't and didn't help us. We had to find something else in a hurry. 

One of our technicians had been reading up on Kerio so we brought one of their machines in and configured it. That's one of the first ones he did and he said that the setup was really good. He installed it and got the client back up and running, and then we started looking into it and found it was much better. Strangely enough, shortly after that, the sales rep we were dealing with at SonicWall left and he went to Kerio also.

Something that really bothers us about GFI, is that as a partner or a reseller, they believe that the customers belong to them. As a reseller, we take a lot of time building trust and confidence with our clients. We've been in business 30 odd years, and we still have clients with us that we took on back 30, 32, 37 years ago. They're still our clients, they deal with us, and they trust us. SonicWall did it and now GFI does it. They insist on all of the contact information for our customers if we sell them a machine. Then they start direct emailing them and our clients start saying, "I hired you to take care of this, why are these people sending me all this junk?"

Plus, we're in Canada and they send out this information and emails and it has U.S. pricing on it. They make a big deal about that it's only $100 or something, and then by the time we convert it to Canadian, we're looking at $135 and the clients forget that very quickly. It's very misleading to clients. Our customers don't like it. That's one of the other reasons that we're moving everybody from Kerio, because of what GFI's policy is of insisting on having all of our customer's names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, and everything else.

Kerio Control is something that's being added to most of the network of the boats that we deal with. We deal with a lot of boats that look fantastic on the outside, but on the inside as far as the nuts and bolts go, they are not well maintained or they have really old equipment. That's one of the things that we always deal with. One of the things I always talk to captains about when I go on a boat is I ask them, "What are the chances that the owner's going to come on board with a 10-year-old computer and a 10-year-old phone?" And he answers, "Zip to zilch." So I say "Well, your network's 10 years old." It's going to work based on what you have in the technology of anywhere from even five years ago compared to today. It's not just a matter of throwing a Kerio in and saying, "Everything's going to be fine." Typically, it's a component of a network upgrade to include switches and access points.

We tried a few different Windows-based products. That's how we found Kerio because it offered a Hyper-V solution and it also offered a hardware solution if you wanted. I'll try the software one first and see where we go. There were a couple of other products we used before. Originally, we used to use Microsoft, the ISA server back in the day because that got swallowed up by Fortinet and we didn't touch that. 

There was another Windows product, WinGate. That has a really bad reliability problem. It would stay up but the connections were very slow going through that thing. Maybe it was poorly configured on my part, but it just seemed to be incredibly slow at managing the connections. We'd notice a very latent response from web pages and it never, even though it had a massive caching there for caching pages, it just seemed to never be as quick as bypassing the WinGate software. That wasn't virtualized. That was running on a native Windows server at the time so that was really quite poor in terms of performance.

I have used a couple of other brands, like SonicWall, but not in a long time. 

Kerio Control has more flexibility, e.g., VPN with the Kerio Control Boxes. Though, some of the other products do have better reporting.

We did not have a previous solution.

Our previous solution was off-brand. We upgraded because it did not have enough bandwidth to support our faster internet speeds. That's the real reason why we upgraded. It was not able to have a VLAN and a second LAN for our public site. That was another reason why we upgraded. We didn't feel it was as secure as Kerio.

I previously used Cisco Firepower and Netgear.

I did try out another solution called Unify but it wouldn't work very well. I couldn't get the VPN tunneling to work. The GUI was not intuitive and it was all over the place. Things were not all in the same spot. 

I actually bought several of them. I was going to go away from Kerio. I didn't like the way Unify worked. You had to have a gateway key in order for it to work. You took two devices to make one device work. I ended up scrapping that project and kept Kerio.

We have used Sophos in the past. 

I switched from SonicWall because, at the time, they did not accurately report the throughput of the router when all of the UTM features were enabled. Also, setting up the traffic rules was not as easy as Kerio Control.

We did not have a previous solution. 

Previously I was using OPNsense and pfSense. However, Kerio Control is more user-friendly and stable than pfSense and OPNsense.

My clients generally replace solutions like SonicWall and Fortinet with Kerio but sometimes they don't have a firewall at all, so we set them up with their first firewall.

It's easier when all our customers are using the same firewall. It makes it easier for us to manage them across the board. We use Kerio across the board.

We used to use a lot of Fortinet but now we've replaced that with Kerio because of the support and price, although now the support is not so good. The price is fair and the features are all pretty much the same.

I did use other solutions previously. I switched because they suddenly made the Kerio Control license end-of-life.

We have experience with pfSense. 

With Kerio, everything is just a bit more cohesive. Everything fits together. With pfSense, you need to install add-ons to get the features you need. You can have the same features as Kerio, but it may require installing an add-on. With Kerio, of course, everything is already there.

Another very nice feature I like with the pfSense firewall is the ability to actually run a packet capture on the router, on the gateway itself. Thatis something very useful that I miss having access to, as it's not available on Kerio.

I have tried a Zyxel Firewall product. 

I used to work with Cisco products. We switched to Kerio because they promised a lot of products, and the initial cost was less as compared to other products.

None

Yes, we switched due to the favourable pricing, many features and robust performance of Kerio Control.

I have used a couple of other solutions.

For me, they are straightforward. However, the reason we chose this solution is because it has to be something that the captain can understand. It has to be a straightforward user interface. 

If it were a situation where a client were going to be managing every aspect of it and the captain is not going to be involved, I would probably choose pfSense or something else.

We switched from our previous solution to Kerio Control, due to it administration and scalability.