Cyberoam CR750ia review

Can Cyberoam’s latest UTM appliance keep your users under control with its identity based security approach? Read this exclusive review of the CR750ia to find out.

Commtouch handles anti-spam so the CR750ia lets you apply a global policy to all users and fine tune it with custom policies. Scores are applied to each message and you can quarantine, drop or reject SMTP messages or tag the subject line, whilst for POP3 you can accept a suspect message or tag it.

Reporting sees some of the biggest changes with the introduction of Cyberoam's iView. This Syslog server is integrated into the appliance where it takes all logging information and presents it in a separate web interface. The iView dashboard provides a graphical summary of allowed and denied traffic. Click on a bar graph and you're presented with a complete breakdown of all traffic types presented as a collection of pie charts.

These provide details of protocol spreads for allowed traffic, firewall, virus and spam activity, web content filtering, FTP, IPS and much more. Cyberoam provides hundreds of predefined reports where you can view host activity, general application, web and mail usage, detected attacks and spam and even criteria being entered in a range of search engines.

Compared with the big names in network security, Cyberoam's new CR750ia is very good value as it has a remarkable range of features for the price. Its identity based security can control virtually all user Internet activity and the new iView utility is capable of provided sophisticated reporting facilities.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

Cyberoam’s identity based security sets it apart from the competition as it’s more sophisticated and allows far greater levels of control over user’s Internet activity to be maintained. It’s good value, easy to deploy and the new iView reporting tool provides impressive levels of detail for all activities.

Chassis: 1U rack CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 2.67GHz Memory: 2GB DDR2 Storage: 160GB SATA Network: 14 x Gigabit Ethernet Power: 2 x 200W hot-plug supplies Management: Web browser, CLI Warranty: 1 year advanced hardware replacement Options: 1year Security Value subscription with AV, IPS and content filtering, £3,158; 1year Total Value subscription with AV, anti-spam, IPS and content filtering, £3,509 (all ex VAT)

Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.