The Cyberoam 1000i appliance comes fully loaded with many great features for broad gateway security. The feature set of this appliance includes the basics, such as firewall, gateway anti-virus and IPS/IDS, but it also packs a more serious punch with a full scale internet access and filter policy engine. With this engine an administrator can restrict or open internet use by bandwidth usage, surf time and data transfer. The administrator can setup specific URL filter policy. Also included with this device is a spam filter engine, which can tie directly into the existing mail system.
This product is simple to operate straight out of the box. Once we unpacked the appliance and placed it into our test network we accessed a short setup wizard from the web GUI and in minutes the box was up and running with an almost complete configuration and default policy. The web GUI itself is simple to use and intuitive to navigate. We found creating policies to be easy and most were already created by default. The only problem we ran into was that the firewall rules were tricky to configure and it took us some time to get it working properly.
We found this device to perform very well under testing. The IPS and firewall worked wonderfully together to thwart even our most brutal attacks. We also found the Active Directory integration to create user- and group-based policy on our existing structure quite useful.
Documentation for this product includes a small quick start guide and several other PDF documents, including a user guide found on the website. The quick start guide, though only a few pages long, nicely details the initial deployment and setup. The user guide is also quite detailed and provides many screen shots and configuration examples of the inner workings of the appliance.
Cyberoam offers many levels of support — from basic, which includes options like updates, email, chat, OS upgrades, and phone support during the business day through premium, which adds 24/7/365 support and much faster problem response times. Also available on the website support area is knowledge base and technical documentation.
For the device and one year of basic support this box is just about $10,700, which puts it toward the upper tier of the price scale. However, we find this appliance to be a good value for the money based on its large feature set and ease of use.
