In the business world, the phrase “do you eat your own dog food,” has become so prevalent, it’s been turned into a verb, “dogfooding”. As leaders in the IT industry, we buy and test software and hardware solutions prior to recommending them to clients. There are many reasons a managed IT business might settle on a solution to offer their clients. We only recommend the solutions that we decide to use after rigorous testing and analysis.
We recently tested all of the leading firewall solutions for a year to see which one came out on top. Deciding on the right solution, the one we’d recommend to our clients, meant that we had to live with it for a while to understand a client’s experience. This is what we found.
The Process
Firewalls are meant to protect your network from unwelcome intrusions while allowing useful traffic to pass through without too much hassle. A good firewall solution should be extremely secure while remaining relatively easy to use and support, so we tried our best to break them. Since we work with technology, we can probe deep into the software and be extremely critical.
We found that the security on the leading industry firewall solutions was top-notch, but they didn’t necessarily perform as well when you considered usability, support, and cost. The devil is in the details, and we made sure we understood every detail before making a decision.
After living with Cisco, Fortinet, SonicWall, and WatchGuard, we decided to move forward with Fortinet. The Fortinet firewall platform is a suite of services that sit on a physical device loaded with software and integrated with cloud solutions so companies are protected on-site.
Benefits
In-house research and testing provide a competitive advantage for us because it allows us to offer cutting-edge business technologies to our clients:
- The cost of doing research in-house is compensated by the reliability we can ensure after a rollout, which saves everyone time and resources.
- We don’t have to wait for the industry to adopt a new, best-of-breed solution. By doing our own testing, we can stay ahead of the curve with our technology offerings.
- Since we dissect all of our solutions, our support is extremely adept at troubleshooting, if a problem were to arise.
By using the solutions we recommend to clients, we can be reliable while offering cutting-edge technology with superior support. If you’d like to find out what we think of your current IT solutions, give us a call today.
