Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of WORKS2011
WORKS2011Flag for United States of America

asked on

Home Business Firewall Solution

Since COVID we have more and more clients moving equipment into their home offices. Many have a server or NAS protecting their data. We're researching firewalls for this type of setup and appreciate EErs feedback. 


We're looking at the SonicWall TZ290. We were considering the SOHO model but our understanding is it's discontinued. 

Avatar of Jason Johanknecht
Jason Johanknecht
Flag of United States of America image

Sonic Wall I believe is not making any new models with the SOHO name, but the firewalls in the TZ line will continue in the future.  

I recommend Checkpoint for this solution: https://www.checkpoint.com/

We support Sonic Wall, Fortinet, and Checkpoint (My personal favorite of the bunch).

Avatar of Robert

The TZ line are fairly good devices I use a 470 and like it. 

As long as you have a basic understanding of networking they are easy to setup. 


Avatar of noci
noci

Nitrokey has a OpnSense firewall

Zywall has several models


Merakis are easier to manage remotely, since they're all controlled online from a centralized location, especially if you have lots of remote users to manage.

Almost all of your choices have online management portals now a days.

The others generally require some extra setup to connect them online, or you need to pay additional fees to join their cloud.  Meraki is only online.  That saves some steps.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Jason Johanknecht
Jason Johanknecht
Flag of United States of America image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial

Sure, Checkpoint makes sense for your case, and I'm not a Meraki fanboy.  I've done Cisco, Aruba, Palo Alto, and Unifi for companies too.  It's just better for this particular case.  You don't have to go visit every home each time you need to configure something, and you will know if they're down, so you can check if there's an outage in their area.


That local access makes sense for an organization, but when you're setting up for multiple remote home users, it's simpler to have them all on the web with meraki.  You're not going to go visit everyone's home and check their cable or DSL connection.  If the home user is down, it's usually because their ISP is down, and rarely due to hardware failures on a Meraki.  It's basically a "set it and forget it" setup for the home users.  In those rare cases, it's simpler to either visit their home or send a pre-configured replacement.

Avatar of WORKS2011

ASKER

serialband, I agree with you that it will mostly be forget it and set it, but...when that one-time internet is acting up, maybe a DNS issue and we can't access a firewall it really makes things difficult. We experienced this enough already with the new apps that ISP's are running now that get in the way of configuring devices that need more attention than plug-and-play, or set and forget.

You can connect to them locally too.  

Did I misunderstand, once Meraki's are configured they can also be manage locally?

No, they can be reached to regain access to the internet.  If you're having issues connecting, that's step one anyways.  It's also used to start initial setup.


There's OpenWRT if you want to repurpose older, unsupported Merakis.