Cyberoam CR15wi review

Appliance-based network security is still seen by many SMBs as an expensive luxury, but Cyberoam is keen to change this perception. We were sufficiently impressed with the CR15i to give it a Recommended award, but the new CR15wi takes every feature it offers and adds a whole heap of new ones.

It's the first Cyberoam appliance to sport an 802.11n wireless AP, and it's the first look at the latest Version X firmware. This delivers a new web interface common to all Cyberoam appliances, which is easier to use and opens with a new dashboard view showing all detected threats, details about the appliance and subscription status. It's more informative than the previous interface, which focused heavily on web activity and user's surfing patterns.

Cyberoam's identity-based security makes the CR15wi extremely versatile. You can apply policies to groups or individual users, plus IP addresses or address pools, allowing you to enforce security at any level. The appliance supports three user types where a normal user logs on to the appliance via the locally installed Corporate Client utility.

We used the client on our Windows 7 test systems and configured it to log in automatically in the background. If you have an external directory server you don't need the client as once authenticated, users are automatically logged on to the appliance.

Once authenticated, you can apply a wide range of security policies including web filtering, internet access and bandwidth usage. Data transfer limits on uploads and downloads can also be enforced, and you can specify different values for daily, weekly, monthly and yearly limits.