Cyberoam CR15wi review

Appliance-based network security is still seen by many SMBs as an expensive luxury, but Cyberoam is keen to change this perception. We were sufficiently impressed with the CR15i to give it a Recommended award, but the new CR15wi takes every feature it offers and adds a whole heap of new ones.

It’s the first Cyberoam appliance to sport an 802.11n wireless AP, and it’s the first look at the latest Version X firmware. This delivers a new web interface common to all Cyberoam appliances, which is easier to use and opens with a new dashboard view showing all detected threats, details about the appliance and subscription status. It’s more informative than the previous interface, which focused heavily on web activity and user’s surfing patterns.

Cyberoam’s identity-based security makes the CR15wi extremely versatile. You can apply policies to groups or individual users, plus IP addresses or address pools, allowing you to enforce security at any level. The appliance supports three user types where a normal user logs on to the appliance via the locally installed Corporate Client utility.

We used the client on our Windows 7 test systems and configured it to log in automatically in the background. If you have an external directory server you don’t need the client as once authenticated, users are automatically logged on to the appliance.

Once authenticated, you can apply a wide range of security policies including web filtering, internet access and bandwidth usage. Data transfer limits on uploads and downloads can also be enforced, and you can specify different values for daily, weekly, monthly and yearly limits.

In bridged mode the appliance offers a single wireless AP, but in routed mode it can present seven more – each with their own encryption scheme and DHCP server. Firewall rules can be used to control wireless traffic and enforce functions such as antivirus, anti-spam and IM scanning.

As our wireless clients were using the Corporate Client to log in to the appliance we could go even further and apply security policies to user and group identities. Yet another useful feature is the ability to attach identities to rules, so we could even have firewall policies that applied only to certain live users or groups.

Anti-spam comes courtesy of the Commtouch service, which performed extremely well during testing. We left the appliance filtering live email for three weeks and saw a spam detection success rate of 98.5%.

The new IM app controls use rules to control the login process and block or allow text chats, file transfer and web cam sharing. Creating IM contacts and groups takes this even further as different access policies can be applied to selected users and you can decide what features they may use.

The reporting services provided with previous firmware versions has been offloaded on to the new iView software. Run from any Windows host, this is a Syslog server that takes all data from multiple appliances, stores it in a central database and provides a wealth of reporting tools.

Cyberoam’s new CR15wi offers a remarkable range of security measures for the price, and its subscription charges won’t break the bank either. This is probably the best value security appliance currently on the market.

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