[hotpotamus]

I work for a small company and they seem to have figured this out 20 years ago. I've been tasked with supporting the network and I've got to say that all the fancy (or not) proprietary firewalls all seem like a pick your own poison of cost/support issues, and they all go end of life eventually but the network needs to keep running. We also use PFSense in a few places and I think the feeling among the operations team (2.5 of us) is that we'd like to just use that in future.

[BVCommander]

I use PFSense and Snort at home and it's perfectly fine for the price I paid for it, but enterprise grade it ain't. I wouldn't use it to protect a network worth more than my beer budget.

I don't know what business you're in and maybe after a nightly tape backup there's nothing important for you to lose. Frankly that's most small businesses. But if you've got real trade secrets get a proper IDS/IPS before you regret it.

[hotpotamus]

Sure, the networking thing is a part time job for all of us, and there's even been some talk of bringing in professional services to look over it a bit. But my question is, what would we get? The whole IDS/IPS/WAF industry seems pretty much dripping in snakeoil. It seems like Cisco was once the king, but has lost a lot of respect. Palo Alto seems to be the current fashion but unless you have a serious alcohol problem, it's going to exceed your beer budget. I worked with Imperva and Alert Logic back in the day and no one ever seemed too impressed with them. Then there's SonicWall which seems reviled and Fortigate which seems like the reasonable budget option. I'm sure there's tons others I'm not even aware of.

[thedougd]

VMware :)