Best Firewall and Content Filter Solution

[Tyras]

Morning
Sorry if this is the wrong forum, but it seemed like the best fit.

We're looking to upgrade our main Firewall router and also looking to implement some sort of content filter. I've been looking at SonicWALL with the added content filter subscription, but I must say I've never been ecstatic about SonicWALL.
A bit of background. We're a small-medium business with 30 seats, but enough data is exchanged to put us in line with the average 100 seat company. We are also hosting 2 separate public websites. Also, given the nature of the data we work with, we require a higher level of security than normal.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

[NJForensics]

Watchguard Fireboxes aren't bad. Great on security. They are, however, one of the more difficult to intially setup.

Check into SurfControl. Pretty manageable and highly effective. You can categorize websites and check unauthorized access by category. Lots of bells and whistles.

Chris Clancy, EnCE
Miles Technologies
clancy@4miles.com

 

[Auger282]

as for content filtering we love the reporting features in Websense.. I'd take a look

 

[Stevehewitt]

Depends on your budget. We are a similar sort of company (30 seats but as a web dev company we host test/stage servers for some very large customers who demand access etc. thus we require a beefier solution for network and security)

I can't rave enough about the FortiGate range. Superb routers - even the smaller ones are enterprise grade with all the bells and whistles and the content filtering is great. Used the other brand SOHO ones which you should avoid like the plague, and also used SurfControl - which is great although probably overkill.

Checkout the FortiGate 100 series or even the smaller 60 series. Very good, and whilst expensive they actually do everything they say very, very well.

Good Luck,




Steve.

"They have the internet on computers now!" - Homer Simpson

 

[cmeagan656]

I have to second Stevehewitt. The Fortigate range is excellent. We've been using a Fortigate-60 for 3 years now and haven't had any problems.

Cheers.

 

[hedidit]

We use surfcontrol on many sites and it works really well and produces good / handy reports...

 

[pronet74]

I didn't like surf control since you had to have a server running it on your network, plus very expensive.

I found a great site I use for my company.

http://www.webbalanced.com/

It runs us $400 a year for 20 employees. Sign into their website, setup your users and/or workstations, you can filter out websites by categories or by individual ones. It then creates a 'plugin' and you download & install on each workstation. Note you don't have to download & install everytime you change a setting. The reporting features they give are very good as well.