cyberoam Web Filtering review

Cyberoam’s UTM devices have a keen concentrate on identity-based security and its most recent CR750ia takes that tech to mid-sized businesses. A Lot Of rivaling vendors proffer that specific feature – where security policies might be applied to particular individuals – though Cyberoam goes that additional mile with a more difficult range of controls.

The CR750ia, provided for that study by e92plus, is a compact 1U rack equipment. That is one of 6 models in Cyberoam’s new Accelerator Series, which all come with multi-core processors.

The CR750ia is well defined, as it sports a quick 2.66GHz Q9400 Core Two Quad processor partnered by 2GB of DDR2 memory. Inner storage/quarantining is cared for by a single 160GB SATA hard drive and the equipment has dual redundant hot-plug power supplies. Link options are quite fine: Fourteen Gigabit ports to play with and all support LAN, WAN or perhaps DMZ duties.

Setup is handled well and we had the equipment up and running in the laboratory in some minutes. A rapid-start wizard proffers a selection of routed and bridged modes and we selected the previous. You might in addition start the equipment in a passive tracking mode, or perhaps apply one of 2 default security policies to all traffic.

First contact with the web interface uncovers a fresh blueprint, as it now shows the status of all subscriptions and updates, together with identified menaces for instance malware, web and mail viruses and IPS alerts. The preceding interface was muddled and provided too much data about web-surfing action and surfing patterns.

Identity-based security commences with validation and the CR750ia proffers a local person and group DB, or perhaps you might use AD, NT Domain, LDAP and Radius servers.

Single IP addresses and pools might in addition be utilized in security policies to stop individuals signing in from undefined groups of systems or perhaps individual workstations.

Individuals are placed in one of 3 groups that establish validation necessities. ‘Typical individuals’ have the Cyberoam Business Purchaser utility set up on their system, which will log them in to the equipment.

Those utilizing an exterior register server don’t need local agents, as they’ll be auto signed in to the equipment once authenticated.

Clientless individuals don’t authenticate with the equipment, though you can’t apply surfing and information transfer quotas or perhaps World Wide Web access time constraints to them.

Once the individuals have been declared, you might apply a range of controls, incorporating web filtering, World Wide Web access and bandwidth utilization policies. Transfer restrictions on uploads and downloads might be enforced, founded on every day, every week, each month and even once a year utilization.

For IM application controls, most UTM devices might only apply blanket block-or perhaps-permit actions to these protocols. The CR750ia is more difficult, as it might use IM contact groups and rules to control the login process and block or perhaps permit text chats, file transfer and web camera sharing.

The fundamental equipment supplies an SPI firewall and you might tweak security at the port level by grouping them in zones. Firewall rules incorporate the standard mix of source and destination ports or perhaps zones, services, block-or perhaps-permit actions for particular traffic types and time plans.

Utilizing the enhanced firewall rules, you might allow AV and anti-spam, add policies for IPS, bound World Wide Web access and apply worldwide bandwidth constraints. Application filters might in addition be applied in firewall policies and applied to limit the use of games, VoIP, P2P applications and so forth.

Cyberoam proffers a quantity of low-cost options, with a one-year value subscription to AV, IPS and content filtering costing £3,158. The total value subscription is worth getting, as it adds anti-spam, though only raises costs to £3,509. There are no person licence constraints on any of the features.

All too a lot of vendors still charge additional for HTTPS web content filtering, though Cyberoam incorporates that as standard. A helpful feature is the capability to apply diverse actions to a particular Link type, so for some you can reject HTTP links and only permit secure HTTPS access.

Anti-spam is handled by Commtouch, which we’ve at all times uncovered supplies outstanding detection rates with minimum fictitious positives. You might start with a worldwide anti-spam policy for all individuals and then add custom policies for finer control. Based on the score applied to every single one message, you might tag, quarantine, drop or perhaps rebuff SMTP messages and for POP3 mail you might acknowledge a suspect message or perhaps tag it.

Cyberoam scores quite for its new iView reporting service, as that is capable of supplying an affluence of data about all security actions. For its smaller devices, iView runs as a separate Syslog server, though that is incorporated in the CR750ia and is obtainable straight from the web console.

It opens with a dash panel view supplying graphical summaries of permitted and refuted traffic; clicking on a bar graph or perhaps pie chart permits you to drill down deeper for more data. Cyberoam supplies loads of predefined reports, so you might fast view specified data on protocol spreads, firewall action and identified viruses and spam, plus web surfing and FTP actions for individual individuals.

The CR750ia supplies a remarkable range of security measures and subscriptions to the not obligatory features are reasonable. Deployment is plain, the new iView reporting instrument notable and Cyberoam stands out for its all-embracing identity-based security.

Cyberoam CR750ia is obtainable to acquire from e92plus. For more data visit www.e92plus.com

writer: Dave Mitchell