Product Review: WatchGuard Firebox T10-W Offers Value

WatchGuard has beefed up its unified threat management (UTM) product line by packing a wealth of features into this paperback-sized device.

Like UTM appliances from other manufacturers, the Firebox T10-W integrates a wide variety of protective capabilities, including firewall, anti-virus and virtual private network. But WatchGuard also delivers features that are typically found on more expensive enterprise-class devices, such as advanced persistent threat blocking and application-level awareness. This affords state and local government branch offices with solid security at an attractive price.

The Firebox T10-W proved easier to deploy than previous WatchGuard models — setup is fairly close to plug and play, and many of the default settings are adequate for getting started quickly. While the manufacturer still has several Windows-only management tools, it has begun to add more functionality to its web interface. Putting more reporting and monitoring functions in the web interface makes the unit more accessible to IT managers at remote locations.

Not only is it easy to produce actionable reports with the Firebox T10-W, but several dashboards show near-real-time threat analyses and usage statistics and can graph these so that trends are easy to spot. Menus are clearly grouped, and IT managers can quickly access protection policies if they need to be tightened or loosened for particular employees.

Security managers can use the Firebox T10-W as a stand-alone UTM or as part of a distributed collection with centralized management to coordinate multiple units. Nearly touchless remote deployment is handy when shipping several WatchGuard boxes to different destinations.

Learn more about WatchGuard’s Dimension management software here.