Cloud or on-premises management of firewall appliances – which is better?

Cloud or on-premises management of firewall appliances – which is better?

The answer to this question – as is so often the case – is that it depends on what you want to do. That’s not a cop-out in any way though. It’s absolutely the case that there are benefits to taking a cloud-based approach and to managing devices locally. If you do it one way, you don’t get the benefits of the other – and vice-versa.

But why should you have to compromise? Well, with our new Smart Sync feature in the Nebula cloud platform you don’t – you can do both. Changes made using Nebula will be mirrored in the local web management console and any modifications made locally, will also be applied within Nebula.

Best of both worlds

This is much better for admins and MSPs who need to move between these two ways of changing the configuration of security devices. It is much less complicated, saves a lot of time, and gives you the best of both worlds.

Why have we waited until now to introduce Smart Sync? Well, security configuration is complicated and not something you want to mess-up. It’s something we’ve wanted to do for some time. It’s taken us a little while, but we have overcome the technical challenges and what that means is that Zyxel Networks customers and MSP partners now have functionality that (as far as we are aware) is not available from any other vendor of network firewalls.

Added flexibility

Just to reiterate the point; with Smart Sync what you get is the best of both worlds. You can use Nebula for centralized management and mass deployment at scale, leveraging the cloud to make uniform configuration changes across all devices, yet still make very specific configuration changes on a localized basis – either because they can’t be done in the cloud or they are just for that specific device.

This added layer of flexibility means you don’t need to worry about which method of management to choose as your default. Changes are reflected across the board, whether they are made locally or in the cloud. If you’d like to learn more about Smart Sync, please get in contact with your nearest Zyxel Networks office or partner.