Cyberoam CR750ia review

Indian company Cyberoam has been making a big play for the UK security appliance market over the past couple of years and a key feature of all its appliances is identity base security. This isn’t new as most established network security vendors allow policies to be applied to users and groups rather than just systems or IP addresses. However, Cyberoam aims to go further by offering far greater levels of control over what your users can do.

In this exclusive review we look at the CR750ia which was supplied to us by E92Plus and is aimed at mid-sized businesses and enterprises. This 1U rack appliance is endowed with a good hardware specification including dual hot-plug power supplies and any of its fourteen Gigabit ports can be configured for LAN, WAN or DMZ duties as required.

The CR750ia provides the full gamut of security services which starts with an SPI firewall and support for IPsec VPNs. To these you can add a choice selection of features including anti-virus, anti-spam, IPS, SSL VPNs and filtering for web content and applications.

The appliance supports both routed and transparent bridge modes and we opted for the latter which only took a few minutes to deploy in the lab. The web interface begins with a wizard and after providing IP addresses for the LAN and WAN ports we could start the appliance in passive mode or apply one of two default security policies to all traffic.

Cyberoam has redesigned the main web interface which now opens with a new dashboard view. This clearly shows all detected threats such as viruses, spyware and DoS attacks, details about the appliance and the status of subscriptions. The previous interface focused on web activity and users' surfing patterns and wasn’t as useful.