Zyxel ZyWALL USG 50

ZyXEL's ZyWALL USG 50 is a security gateway designed specifically for the small business. The appliance includes a firewall, intrusion prevention system, Web content filtering, antivirus, antispam, and application control. The USG50 is not for someone just looking for a firewall, or just an intrusion prevention system. The little box is a full-fledged unified threat management appliance which packs serious punch with its laundry list of capabilities. While it's easy for a small business to get up and running with a basic network, even as a load balancer, this UTM is not intended for a casual user. It does require some tweaking and manual setup to get some of the features not enabled by default, such as the IPSec VPN, up and running, but I was able to use the firewall rules to restrict the type of traffic entering and leaving the network without too much trouble.

Who's it for?
ZyWALL blows away the Cisco RV 110WWireless-N VPN Firewall and RV 180W Wireless-N Multifunction Router because it can do so much more than just be a firewall and VPN router. While it can't provide wireless networking, it offers a long list of security tools, load balancer capabilities, and DNS support on top of basic firewall and VPN services.

On the other hand, it is not as powerful as the BeSecure Gateway from Wedge Networks, which is intended for much larger environments. In fact, the USG50 straddles a nice comfortable area in the middle where small businesses need more than a basic firewall, but don't need to be supporting hundreds of users.

The basic license supports 10 users, but there is no reason businesses can't upgrade to a license supporting more users. The appliance can support more users. The USG50 can support both five simultaneous IPSec tunnels and two SSL VPN tunnels out of the box. It is possible to upgrade the SSL VPN to support up to five simultaneous connections. If the user needs more VPN connections, the USG50 may be just too small.?

Specs?
The USG50 has Gigabit Ethernet on all four of its LAN ports and two WAN connections on the front panel. The two USB ports can be used to connect a selection of 3G adapters that can be used as a failover in case network connectivity is lost.

There is no fan, which makes it silent during operation. The back panel has a serial console for management. It measures 6.5 inches by 9.5 inches by 1.4 inches (HWD) and weighs a little over 2.5 pounds.

Supported Features
The USG 50 has a long list of supported security features, but many are available only as optional add-ons. The customer has to buy separate licenses to take advantage of the antivirus protection, content filtering capabilities, intrusion detection, and application patrol.

The appliance includes anti-spam for default, for free, but I found the performance erratic. I was able to create blacklists and whitelists based on keywords in the email message's subject lines. I could also list up to five DNS-based Blackhole List (DNSBL) services, such as Spamhaus and Spamcop. When I tested the antispam capability against some messages coming into a test account over a one-week period, some days, the appliance stopped more than half of the junk messages, and other days, less than a tenth of the messages were blocked.

There is a separate subscription to upgrade the antispam engine to use Commtouch's cloud-based anti-spam platform, which costs $140.

The other security features are provided on a subscription basis. The USG50 offers content filtering services from BlueCoat and from Commtouch. The filtering service allows administrators to easily block certain types of Web content based on 70 different pre-set categories. Filtering rules can be defined for all users, groups, or individual users.

The antivirus engine is from Kaspersky Lab. Since the gateway's antivirus is not intended to be a replacement for having antivirus software on the endpoint, but just act as an additional layer of defense, I did not fully test the engine's effectiveness in this review. I did try to download certain malware samples online and saw them be blocked.

Depending on what features the business winds up selecting, the appliance can wind up costing double its unit price. The MSRP is $350, but content filtering is $120, antivirus protection $110, intrusion prevention at $80, and content filtering from Commtouch is $110.

When logged into the interface, the user may see upsells for additional features, which can't be turned off.

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