IT Pro Verdict

The CR1000iNG-XP offers mid-sized businesses high performance network security at a sensible price. Easy to deploy and packed with features, it can also be easily expanded to keep in step with demand

Reasons to buy

+
Excellent value; Easy installation; Top performance; User-based security policies; Reporting included as standard

Reasons to avoid

-
Non hot-swap network modules

By Dave Mitchell

published 31 July 2015

in Reviews

More security

Controls for users and groups include web filtering, internet access and bandwidth usage policies. We could enforce data transfer limitations on uploads and downloads and set limits on daily, weekly, monthly and yearly usage.

Clientless users don't log on to the appliance but for these you can't apply surfing and data transfer quotas or Internet access time restrictions. However, the appliance can now redirect these users to a captive web portal where they enter their credentials.

Web filtering rules support HTTP and HTTPS as standard and a useful feature is the ability to assign different actions to a category. You could, for example, block HTTP access to business web sites but allow secure HTTPS connections.

For anti-spam, we could apply a global policy to all users and fine tune it with custom policies. Suspect messages can be dropped, rejected or quarantined to the appliance's internal 1TB hard disk and the spam digest service sends regular spam advisory reports to users.

The iView report tool is included in the price and delivers a wealth of information

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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.