Calyptix AccessEnforcer as your firewall for SBS 2008

Sometime ago, Harry Brelsford, CEO of SMB Nation, asked his readers on his e-newsletter what they thought about Calyptix AccessEnforcer as a firewall to use in conjunction with SBS 2008.

One of our partners, Jason Harrison, responded to Harry's request. Harry has published Jason's response.

For ease of reference, here's what Jason said:

I too have an extensive background with ISA / SBS firewalls (dating back to Proxy 2.0) and decided last year to start making the move towards stand alone UTM devices replacing ISA and the basic SBS standard firewall solution. Why? UTM’s provide yet another critical layer of enhanced security that the SBS platform did not offer. Now with the SBS 2008 changes, I find myself ahead of the curve a bit in this area.

I started off working with SonicWALL devices. I continued to look for alternatives because I was not that satisfied with what SonicWALL had to offer. I did deeply investigate WatchGuard and several others (all that were mentioned in the newsletter plus a few more). I choose Calyptix Security as the UTM / firewall device of choice for the following reasons:

• Easy to configure and manage
  
• Hardware platform was far superior to the competition (1GHz processor, 512MB RAM, 40+ GB HD – killer hardware man! Pair it up with SBS 2008 premium and you have EBS lite! J)
  
• Software platform – OpenBSD OS: The most secure OS on the planet! Snort technology: sets the bar by which all other IDS/IPS systems are compared – THE gold standard in the industry, used by FBI and the Pentagon / US Dept of Defense.
  
• DyVax: Calyptix own ground breaking, zero day, anti-malware, signature-less, scanning engine – first to catch all of the major threats over the last couple of years based on independent reports.
  
• SBS Integration / AD Integration
  
• Company has the SBS market square in their sights and wants to become THE UTM choice for the SBS market.
  
• Killer features, solid information about security events, traffic trends, web use, etc.
  
• Friendly flexible licensing
  
• Incredible performance – one user streaming video or some other bandwidth intensive process does not bottleneck at the gateway like on other lower powered devices (SW would choke – only 200Mhz processor and 16MB cache)
  
• It just works really, really well
  

Simply put, Calyptix is the box! We’ve been using it here since early spring. I have been recommending / deploying it everywhere including replacing quite a bit of other firewalls with the Calyptix solutions.

For another partner's thoughts, check out Scott Cover's in-depth UTM comparison, where he compared Calyptix and AccessEnforcer against several other firewall products, including SonicWALL and Untangle. We've posted his comparison here before, but now's a good time to bring it up again! :)

Jason and Scott, thank you for your kind words! We appreciate you working with us and putting the word out there for us.