I’ve been evaluating our current firewall situation and came to the following conclusion: We have too many products from too many vendors costing too much money and causing too many headaches.

Currently, we use a Watchguard Firebox X700 for our internal network and DMZ. It’s fine when it works, but gets flaky sometimes. It will randomly stop passing FTP traffic, or you add a new rule and it won’t actually work until you reboot. Overall, I’m not impressed.

Inside the Watchguard sites a Barracuda Web Filter. I like this box - it works great and causes very few issues. They do silly stuff sometimes like adding Northpoint.org to the “Spam” category, but, overall, I’m happy.

For our public network, there is a Sonicwall Pro 3060 running Sonicwall’s own content filtering service. The Sonicwall is a nice box, but has it’s issues with occasionally locking up and other weird stuff. I’ve used them in the past and came to the conclusion that it’s a great small office firewall, but really not an enterprise-class solution. The yearly support cost plus the yearly content filter license gets expensive too.

For VPN, we use a Cisco ASA 5510. This replaced the Watchguard VPN (with is absolutely horrible) and provides VPN access for laptops and a few remote sites (5505’s at the remote sites). I love the ASA firewalls. They are rock solid on both stability and performance and, in my opinion, easier to configure. This is definitely a keeper. Ironically, of the three boxes, the Cisco has the lowest yearly support cost.

I’m sure there were good reasons for implementing each product at the time, but everything but the Cisco was here before my time, so I don’t know all the details.

In putting it all together, this is what I’m seeing:

• We’re paying for subscriptions to two different content filtering services - one for the internal network and one for the public network.
• We have support contracts with 3 different vendors.
• There are some stability problems.
• Learning curve involved with multiple products.

Most of those contracts are up for some renewal, so now is the time for change. My thought is to get another ASA 5510 use it’s multiple interfaces to attach the internet network, the DMZ, and the wireless to one firewall. Then, hang the Barracuda Web Filter off another interface and redirect all outbound http traffic to it via WCCP.

It seems almost two simple. Once firewall for all the network segments, one content filter for everything, one less piece of hardware, more stability. It just makes sense all around. If anyone has an thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them.