Billion BiGuard S10 review

For far too long, SSL VPNs have been in the corporate domain alone, but Billion claims its BiGuard S10 is the first appliance to deliver an affordable gateway solution to the small business that also incorporates firewall features. IPsec VPNs have traditionally been the favoured choice for SMBs, as they cost less to implement. Unfortunately, the downside is they can be ridiculously complex to configure, making them better suited to site-to-site secure tunnels and not so clever for mobile clients. This is where SSL VPNs score highly, as they require minimal client configuration, allowing users to securely connect to the main network using a standard web browser from a remote location.

The BiGuard box offers four switched Fast Ethernet LAN ports and a single WAN port. For internet access, you have a number of options, as it supports PPPoE and dynamic IP addressing or you can provide static address details. Either way, the tidy web management interface makes light work of initial configuration. To test the appliance, we cheated slightly, as we gave the WAN port a static IP address, placed some test clients on this side and put the appliance in between them and our LAN resources. Any remote client that wants LAN access merely loads a web browser, enters the appliance's WAN IP address and provides their user credentials. Authentication options are extensive, as the BiGuard has its own internal user database or it can integrate with AD, LDAP, NT domains and RADIUS servers.

Users are presented with a customisable portal page that offers three access choices. The Network Extender uses an ActiveX plug-in at the client to provide an encrypted connection to the LAN, allowing users to have secure access to all IP-based resources on the main network. The plug-in is loaded automatically on first contact with the appliance, so there's nothing for the user to do other than to select this option in the portal page. You may not want this level of access and this is where the Transport Extender comes in, as this option allows only specific protocols and ports to be advertised to clients. It creates an encrypted tunnel to the LAN, and the portal page displays all applications that the user is allowed to access.

The third option is the Network Place, which extends access to shared resources on the LAN. Selecting this loads a new window showing domains or workgroups and any advertised shares. Select multiple files and folders and you can open or save them to your system, and pick local files and upload them to the selected remote location.

During testing, we found the BiGuard easy to configure. We used a Windows Storage Server 2003 NAS appliance on the LAN and were able to create Transport Extender entries for RDP, FTP, HTTP and HTTPS access in minutes. There's nothing much to do for the Network Extender. You simply decide which clients are allowed to have it available on their portal. This applies equally to the Network Place option, while access to the Transport Extender can be fine-tuned for each application within each user's profile.

With the BiGuard S10, Billion has got it just about right. It offers an impressive range of SSL VPN functions, is easy to use and costs far less than most other hardware solutions currently available.

Author: Dave Mitchell