Portnox CORE Reviews

The primary use of Portnox was for Network Access Control (NAC) and management. It was used to control and manage access to the network in my client's network. Unauthorised devices were locked out until approved and granted by the NAC manager. It showed information including the IP address, MAC address, hostname of device, username, switch location, and port number of where a device is connected to. It covers both wired and wireless. 

Portnox CORE helped in securing my client's threat landscape from attackers and hackers.

For the information security team, the security level was improved because it helped to manage and prevent rogue devices from connecting to the corporate network. The reporting was granular, and reports we scheduled for delivery on Portnox were useful during investigations and audits, especially in cases where the IP address changed.

For network support, it helped in troubleshooting the type of connection challenge that a device or user experienced. Network engineers could identify the location of the device on a switch to verify if the user's challenge was network or device related.

NAS view page gave a virtual graphical view of the switches, similar to the physical view, and just like how you see the ports on them. 

There is an add-on feature for application control to kill unwanted applications when launched on a user's device.

It has a feature to check the compliance state of computers. An example is for an antivirus. It checks if it was installed, installed but not running, or not installed, then it defines policy action based on compliance status, which it applies.

It supports a good number of known antivirus products.

It has scheduling reports for backward review of incidents.

Its knowledge base refers you to similar tickets or solutions.

Areas that Portnox CORE can improve include: 

1. Support for unmanaged switches (or hubs) and other brands of network devices. These kinds of devices are still in use in organisations, especially SMEs who cannot afford to buy a managed switch.
2. The licensing module. This should be reviewed to count the number of devices instead of port numbers of total switches. There is a case for this where not all ports for a switch are used by devices. Unused ports are calculated in the license, then the customer pays for license for those unused ports.  
   

Over three years.

It is stable.

There has been progress from research and development when requests are made or something unusual is discovered during support.

Portnox customer service has been good and quick to respond.

No.

Deployment is straightforward.

Vendor implementation.

The vendor price is fair. licensing was per total number of switch ports.

None.

On-premises

It's being used in a bank of over 4,000 devices, and so far it has been good. No complaints.

Previous to the deployment we didn't have complete visibility of all the endpoints, all the devices that are connected to the network. But with the deployment of portnox, we could see all the devices and where they're connecting. We can equally segregate and apply different rules, policies to each location that we didn't monitor specifically.

It's agentless, and it's scalable.

For now, they just released the new version which has a completely different design interface, and there are some other improvements that were added onto it. So we need to look at it and understand how these features impact the performance and all that before we can make a recommendation.

One thing they can look at is increasing the number of support staff so that there will be more people supporting the solution than they currently have.

It's very, very, stable. 

Of course, it's a scalable solution. One server can support up to 10,000 endpoints and cannot equally be deployed in clusters, where you need more than 10,000.

Tech support is good.

It was easy. It was straightforward. Once you follow the guides it's not complicated.

When selecting a product, if I want to bring in a new solution, I will look up the competing solution: What features do they have that are better than what I'm bringing, which will put me in a better position to make an informed decision and advise the customer accordingly.

If I'm to advise a customer that wants to buy a similar solution, I would first of all find out what their needs are, what their priorities are. Would they want agent or agentless? Would they want software or hardware? Those are the questions I would have to ask before I can say, "Go for this," or, "Go for that." Honestly, all NAC solutions are the same, they do the basic work. So it all depends on the environment, what is obtainable. Some companies don't want agents in their environment, so they go for agentless. Some don't want hardware, so they go for software. So my position is to advise.

I rate this solution a seven out of 10 because it meets my needs of ensuring that my network is protected. But then, I believe there's room for improvement.

We use the solution for NAC which gives us the ability to control networks. 

I am impressed with the solution's voucher capability and authentication. The tool is integrated with Active Direct storage. 

The product should consider more integration with vendors like Huawei. It should also improve visibility. The solution should offer a partner portal that can provide customers training on the in and out of the solution. 

I have been working with the product for more than six months. 

I would rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the tool's scalability a seven out of ten since for large environments it needs more intervention. 

The tool's setup is not complex. You need to have some knowledge about it. 

The tool is more expensive than Fortinet. 

The solution is suited for enterprises. I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for network access control, on the wireless and the wired LAN. This includes managing; network access control, profiling of endpoints and, also managing guests and consultants on the network. 

Great visibility on who and what is connected or joined the network at any one time. This also allows for security posture attainment because of the profiling features of Portnox Core that allow for a particular endpoint update baseline to join the network or be quarantine until the baseline is met

Profiling to me is the solution's most valuable aspect. It gives you an extra edge, and you've got visibility on the status of the endpoints that are connected to your network. It becomes very easy for you to quickly update, and be able to see the level of availability that you have in the environment. It becomes very easy for you to manage your goals before they can even cause any issues.

For a network access control solution, Portnox is a very good solution. It offers great integration in heterogeneous environments that have a number of different vendor equipment. It is not limited, say, to one vendor. For a network access control solution, it's a very good solution.

Their dashboards are great and very easy to navigate.

It's so easy to set up, you may not need outside assistance.

I don't have any negative feedback in regard to the product as a whole. It's worked well for us and has very good features.

If the solution stayed as is, I'd be very happy with it.

However, if there was a change to the solution, it would be interesting if the Portnox team could include aspects of End-user behavior analytics (EUBA), with an aspect of AI to the already great profiling. But I already think quite highly of it.

I've been dealing with the solution for two years at this point.

The solution is quite stable. We don't have issues with it crashing or going offline. It's very reliable.

The licensing model is based on the number of users. Wireless is based on the number of access points. If I want to scale up, it's very easy. You just buy a new license and additional licenses for the users that you have. 

From a scalability point of view, it becomes flexible, in that you can actually buy licenses for exactly the number of users you have, or a range of a number of users that you hope to have. Scalability is fine and doesn't cause any issues.

Unfortunately, I've never contacted technical support. It's very easy for any IT person to deploy the solution due to the fact that it's extremely straightforward. Everything is visible. The dashboard is clear. Therefore, I've never actually gotten a chance to talk to technical support as there's never been a need. 

Maybe later, when they have a wider deployment, looking at having a number of sites on one CORE, I'll need their assistance. For now, I've not yet spoken to support. I only hope that their support is good when I do finally need to reach out. 

It's straightforward. They have a variety of ways you can deploy it. You can deploy it even using an OVA if you're deploying in a virtual environment. The best thing about it is it's mostly agentless, which makes everything very easy. It's not tedious for a system admin to deploy. The product is very good in that regard. Other solutions need you to deploy agents all over the network, to endpoints that are connecting. This is sometimes administratively impossible. With Portnox, you don't need to worry about this, which is great. 

It's fairly priced. From the features that are on offer, I would say that it gives you great value for money. Licensing model is great and is scalable 

I'd advise other organizations considering the solution to switch when you can. If you compare it to other solutions, other solutions are kind of tied to vendor-specific equipment. They have APIs to connect to other vendors. For Portnox, it's the usual communication interfaces that are already actually implemented within most hardware and most solutions.

It is very easy to work with the solution if you have an environment that has a number of different products, which is most of the IT Department across the world. Even if you have the same brand in the environment, it's very good. However, it is impossible to have one solution for doing everything. 

It is a very, very nice product. I would recommend it to any customer. Even to deploy, it's quite easy, and the price is very good.

Overall, I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. I have never had any issue switch it.

On-premises

We just do some basic testing on how the product is working.

We are system integrators, and due to that, we are testing products to see if it makes sense to offer them to other customers.

For a company, the major point is visibility and also the control over who is accessing the network. With this product, you have visibility and also you have control if you want somebody in your network (or not).

The visibility of the product is excellent. 

Overall, it was pretty good in terms of usage.

The initial setup was very easy.

The pricing is reasonable.

I have reason to believe you could scale the product if you needed to.

Technical support was very helpful when we needed them.

It would be ideal if the configuration aspect of the product was easier. It's possible that the documentation could be better and could help with simplifying configuration steps.

The solution did have some stability issues, however, all I had to do was restart it.

We've only used the solution for two to three weeks. It's a product that is still relatively new to us. I tested about six or seven months ago now.

The solution is pretty stable. Not very stable, and yet stable enough. I had some issues with it, however, then I had to restart it. After that, it was fine.

I haven't really tested the scalability due to the fact that the test was not extended to find out how scalable it is. That said, it's my understanding that it is very scalable. For our purposes and how we will use it, it's fine. 

The product seems to be best suited for small to medium-sized organizations.

Technical support was very good. They solved basically all my problems. I was quite satisfied with how helpful and responsive they were. 

I did not find the initial setup to be overly complex or difficult. It was very straightforward and rather simple to deploy.

I handled the deployment and implementation process myself. I did not need the help of an integrator or consultant. 

We have just some list prices, just so we can evaluate the product. That said, from what I have seen, the prices are okay. They're not cheap and they're not very expensive. They are okay in terms of what you get. It's reasonable.

We are a partner of Portnox.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

I would recommend the solution to others based on its ease of use and simple implementation process. 

On-premises

The ability of the product to search the entire network and know what you have hidden on your network.

For tech support, most of the time they do not need to ask the IP address of the client since they see it in portnox.

The GUI and the knoxer remote site functions.

2 years

Yes, it didn't block rogue devices in 90 seconds, it took 6 minutes, but they fixed it. Besides that, there were a few security issues they fixed.

It can't work fully redundant.

Customer Service: High level and good customer service.Technical Support: They have good tech support, but have room for improvement.

Before you choose portnox, make sure that it supports all of your needs.

It's a good product but needs improvement.