Zyxel USG60W
Well-featured, affordable and easy to administer, this is an ideal appliance for smaller businesses
“Zyxel has made ease of use a priority... the new Easy Mode console provides a wizard for nearly every occasion”
SCORE PRICE Appliance with 1yr UTM, £419 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.co.uk
Zyxel’s gateway appliances are aimed specifically at small businesses, and the pricing reflects that.The USG60W sits at the top of a family of four models, combining solid UTM capabilities with integrated dual-band wireless services, yet it costs just £419. That includes your first year’s subscription, which gets you gateway antivirus, web content filtering, IDP, antispam and Zyxel’s own Application Patrol; in addition, the base unit also provides firewalling and VPN services.
Since smaller offices often don’t have a lot of in-house expertise, Zyxel has made ease of use a priority. That’s obvious from first contact with its web interface: once you’ve set a secure administrative password, you’re immediately transported to the new Easy Mode console, which provides a wizard for nearly every occasion.
It’s an approach that works well. The initial setup wizard configured our internet connection in a minute, and walked us through registering our free MyZyxel cloud account and activating the UTM licence. It then offered to apply a base set of security profiles for the web content filter, IDP and antivirus services, and set up secure wireless networks for both employee and guest access.
That will be enough for many offices, but you can customise Wi-Fi services far beyond this if you wish, as both radios support up to eight SSIDs, each with its own encryption scheme. There’s no onboard support for 802.11ac – only the slower 802.11n standard – but the appliance can also manage up to 18 external Zyxel wireless APs, using profiles to conveniently push out configurations.
The Easy Mode console also gives a basic overview of your connection status, along with details of VPNs, security services and wireless networks. The Network Client section allows you to easily browse connected devices, and can be expanded to reveal each one’s name and IP address.
For access to more advanced features, you’ll need to switch to the Expert Mode console. From here you can set up custom antivirus profiles, to enable behaviours such as automatically destroying infected files; you can also manage access to over 3,000 apps via the Application Patrol service. Content filtering profiles meanwhile let you block or allow sites in any of 64 predefined website categories.
This makes it simple to apply a blanket ban on social media use, but some organisations will want employees to be able to access the company Facebook page. We found it was pleasingly easy to create a new application object for Facebook, allowing us to specifically allow or block liking, following, posting and sharing activities.
You’ll also need to use the Expert Mode interface to set up an antispam profile – but this isn’t as complicated as you might fear. With a few clicks we enabled sender reputation analysis, content scanning and virus detection, and configured the filter to tag the subject line of suspect messages.
As well as exposing more settings than Easy Mode, the Expert Mode dashboard presents more administrative information – although we were initially confused as to why we weren’t seeing any figures for content filtering, antivirus and IDP actions. A little digging revealed that statistics collection for each service is disabled by default and must be enabled from the Monitor page.
Once you’re up and running, the console also offers on-board reporting facilities: you can monitor both wired and wireless traffic, and view tables of statistics for each security service. The MyZyxel portal provides a free cloud reporting service too, though this only connects to the content filtering component.
In all, Zyxel’s USG60W is a great choice for small businesses. It offers plenty of security measures at a low price,with impressive Wi-Fi credentials – and the new Easy Mode dashboard makes it absolutely painless to deploy.
SPECIFICATIONS Desktop/rackmount chassis dual-core 800MHz Cavium CN6020 CPU 1GB RAM 6 x Gigabit Ethernet (2 x WAN, 4 x LAN/DMZ/Guest) 2.4/5GHz 802.11abgn wireless 2 x USB 2 serial port external PSU web browser management 5yr limited warranty