- How We Tested
- Astaro Security Gateway 110
- Check Point Safe@Office 1000N
- Netgear ProSecure UTM 50
- SonicWall NSA240
- WatchGuard XTM 810
- Testing Results
- Test Analysis
The Netgear ProSecure UTM 50 is the top end appliance in Netgear’s Prosecure UTM family. This model is designed to protect a small-to-medium sized business and has a maximum stated firewall throughput of up to 950Mbps.
The ProSecure 50 is a standard 1U rack mountable device (44mm x 440mm x 260mm). Brackets are included with the device as standard.
For management tasks, the Netgear ProSecure UTM 50 has one USB port at the front and a console serial port at the rear. It has eight 10/100/1000 Mbps network ports, two of these are dedicated to WAN networking, with the remaining six available for LAN connections. Alternatively, one of the LAN ports can be configured as a dedicated DMZ. Having two dedicated WAN ports is advantageous for two reasons. Firstly, the device can be configured to load balance web requests – using two separate ISP connections simultaneously to improve its bandwidth. A second advantage is that the WAN connections can be configured to ‘primary WAN mode’, which uses one WAN network for all internet requests - reserving the remaining connection as a backup line in the event of the primary WAN connection failing.
By default, Netgear’s ProSecure UTM 50 is shipped with all outbound traffic enabled. Administrators will need to add LAN to WAN firewall rules to ensure their individual security policies are enforced. This solution includes a firewall, making use of Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) methods to detect unwanted network traffic.
The Netgear ProSecure UTM 50 has many network security features on offer including intrusion detection and prevention systems, DoS protection, port/service blocking, stealth mode, TCP/UDP flood blocking mechanisms, and WAN/LAN ping response controls. Its additional security components include anti-virus scanning, anti-spam, URL filtering, IM/P2P blocking, and VPN capabilities.
This device ships with a local DHCP service enabled (by default) making it easy to set up and configure. The ProSecure UTM 50 is configurable over a secure HTTPS channel using a standard web browser. Administrators have the flexibility of configuring the device using setup wizards or manually. There are three setup wizards that can be used; the primary wizard (for core networking configuration and security settings); the IPSec VPN wizard; and the SSL VPN wizard.
Administrators can specify a mail server and email address to receive admin notifications from the Netgear appliance. The monitoring dashboard also provides administrators with a range of security events that include counters for spam, malware, port scans, URL’s accessed, and IM/P2P blocking statistics - all of which, is presented in tabular format accompanied by graphs for a easy analysis.
The Netgear ProSecure UTM 50 makes it simple to handle every day network administration; however, the GUI is not as easy to use or as innovative as some of its competitors (for example, the Astaro Security Gateway 110).
RRP: $1319 AUS
Warranty: 2 year
positive
• High speed networking
• Dual WAN networking options for load balancing of web requests or for a backup WAN connection
• Easy to follow setup wizards
negative
• The web interface looks a bit dated
summary
The Netgear ProSecure UTM 50 provides a well balanced gateway security solution for mitigating a wide scope of threats. This unit is competitively priced, can easily accommodate the network traffic of a small/medium office, but is not as easy to use as other units in this test.