I am shopping around for a firewall for a SMB environment. I'm basically looking for something that will provide good UTM as well as reporting. What I am looking for specifically on reporting is something that allows me to see real-time bandwidth throughput so I can quickly identify bandwiths hogs on our relatively poor (15/2) DSL connection.
There is a local IT services provider that sells and support WatchGuard firewalls, and they gave me a quote on the WatchGuard T35. I also did a bit of research online and saw pfSense recommended quite a bit, so I looked into Netgate appliances with pfSense, and like what I see there.
The question I have that I posed to the guy selling the WatchGuard box is this, "What features/benefits does WatchGuard have that makes it worth paying 2/3 the cost of the box every three years to maintain a "basic" security suite subscription as opposed to buying something running pfSense, where I only need to pay for the appliance?"
The guy selling the WatchGuard basically gave me an emotional "how much do you value your company's data?" argument, claiming he could easily hack into a pfSense box, but when pressed as to what really makes the pfSense insecure the only hard thing he could really give me was the claim that pfSense doesn't automatically detect and block brute force attacks whereas WatchGuard does.
As we are a small business, budget is always a concern so as the in house IT guy I am always looking for products that work well without breaking the bank. I am not completely opposed to paying for a subscription service if I am getting my money's worth from the investment, but I also don't want to pay for something simply for the marketing/branding.
What direction would you guys recommend that I take, or should I be looking elsewhere for a firewall appliance?
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