Conclusions
Well, its time to draw some conclusions.
First of all, remember that this firewall is one of the smallest member of Cyberoam family and it is aimed at the small / branch office market. Its pure-firewall performance are extremely good, while UTM and VPN throughput, albeit vastly lower, are more then adequate for the typical small office. This is especially true here in Italy: considering that most WANs here are xDLS based and rarely have real bandwidth greater then 20/1 Mb/sec (download/upload), this is a perfect fit for most environments.
If you need an UTM capable firewall for your branch office, the Cyberoam CR25ia can be a good solution. However, pay attention to the default configuration: DoS protection is deactivated off-the-shell. This means that you had to manually enable it, otherwise the device remains exposed to some sort of deny-of-services attacks that can affect its capability to route packets.
While the device cost is not super-low, it is lower then other competitors. In the actual, cost-constrained market this can be a decisive advantage. Moreover, it has an integrated reporting solution, providing you with nice (and useful) graphics about network usage. While some vendors will charge you for this features, Cyberoam get it straight into the WebUI for free.
However, the CR25ia has its problems too, especially in the form of 3DES VPN / UTM latency. If you plan to implement latency-sensitive 3DES VPN over fast links and you can not switch to AES encryption, you better consider either an higher model (eg: CR35ia) or a device form another vendor entirely. Moreover, as showed by ICMP flood test, sometime the CR25ia cause exceptionally high latency to occur: this can be a direct consequence of its hard-disk activity, as it seems that, when shorts on memory and/or faced with heavy loads, it kinda “swaps” on its persistent disk storage.
Another thing that can be improved is the documentation: while on Cyberoam's support site you can find many useful informations, I miss the 600+ pages documentation available from other vendors.
If this price falls into your budget, the CR25ia is an excellent machine with first-class features. The only thing that you need to remember is that you need a separate modem / router, as the CR25ia has no integrated modem.
If you want, you can discuss this article with me using the comments system or by writing to
Have a nice day!