When I worked for a small financial-services company, I often would describe our needs as "Small Enterprise": small office scale, enterprise complexity. We were using gear from Watchguard, and I found them to be fairly reasonable to work with.
It might also be worth looking at Fortinet. They definitely do the big iron, but they also have SOHO gear that runs the same code (and therefore has enterprise-grade features in a SOHO box.) -- Christopher Manly Coordinator, Library Systems Cornell University Library Information Technologies [email protected] 607-255-3344 From: Darrell Fuhriman <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Monday, March 18, 2013 4:15 PM To: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: [lopsa-discuss] Small Business Network Security (was: Ideal router recommendation for a small/medium office?) Referencing my post in the thread I just hijacked, I said: It does seem the small-medium business with security needs is very poorly served by vendors. Bruce Schneier quotes Mark Rothman (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/02/all_those_compa.html) "Back when I was on the vendor side, I'd joke about how 800 security companies chased 1,000 customers -- meaning most of the effort was focus on the 1,000 largest customers in the world. But I wasn't joking. Every VP of sales talks about how it takes the same amount of work to sell to a Fortune-class enterprise as it does to sell into the midmarket. They aren't wrong, and it leaves a huge gap in the applicable solutions for the midmarket." Personally, I feel like I've run into this pretty hard. We're a small company (~30 now, hopefully more soon), but because of our industry — finance — our security requirements are getting stronger, or perhaps I should say, I believe our threats are likely to grow more sophisticated as we grow. I feel like a company our size is not well served by the vendors – they're by and large targeting performance *and* features, whereas I need features, but not necessarily performance. It makes no difference to me if your product can push 1Gbps or 200Gbps – I'm on a 10Mbps link. Even low-end security appliances often inch up into the tens of thousands of dollars, which is just unrealistic for a company our size (which has three sites to manage, despite being a fairly low number of employees). Not to mention it seems that anything rack mountable instantly doubles in price. :) We don't have the resources for a dedicated security person, but I'd like something that can enable relatively sophisticated network security. Anyway, maybe I'm being whiny, but I do feel a bit like I'm being left out a little bit. I'd love to hear suggestions from other folks. d.
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