WatchGuard, also an early innovator in making it easy to build and monitor your VPN, has not advanced and is limited in its topologies and capabilities. As the topology changes and firewalls come and go, Global Management System keeps things up-to-date and fully linked.

SonicWall’s Global Management System lets you draw together groups of firewalls into a VPN, and then automatically configures and pushes the VPN configuration to all devices. While they’re not up to the level of leaders such as Check Point and Juniper, SonicWall - another early innovator in centralized management - also has made great strides in its VPN configuration and control capabilities. Complex topologies beyond simple hub-and-spoke or full mesh are easy to define with both tools, and many of the difficult parts of handling very large VPNs (such as tunnel authentication using digital certificates) are not only made simple, but made simple in a way that doesn’t compromise network security.Ĭisco and Juniper also have made good strides in trying to combine site-to-site VPNs with dynamic routing to help reduce the complexity of managing a VPN with a rapidly changing network topology. Good stridesĬheck Point and Juniper also have outstanding VPN definition and management tools for large site-to-site VPNs. While there is still room for improvement in Cisco’s management tool - for example, VPN rules and firewall rules are not linked, which makes policy definition more complex than it needs to be - Cisco is finally making large VPN deployments an easy process. With this release of Cisco Security Manager (CSM) tool, it was good to see that the management tools that the company provides have matured to the level where they match the needs of large VPNs. In previous tests, we have had problems with the quality and coverage of VPN-management tools provided by Cisco.

Despite the fact that VPNs and firewalls have been residing on the same box for over seven years, our testing of both of the site-to-site and remote access VPN capabilities showed an astonishing variation on the quality of VPN implementations.

Check point tradional mode vpn