Things to consider if also buying a SonicWall VPN firewall
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use SonicWall VPN Clients for both our IT department for support purposes and for employees in several other departments that need access to either on-premise files or applications. Use of the VPN clients enables employees to work remotely either full time or when they need to. In rare circumstances, it also allows particular vendors to help IT with various items.
Pros
- It allows employees to work remotely.
- When it works, it works flawlessly.
- It's easy to find logs for the VPN client on the client machine when troubleshooting.
Cons
- The Global VPN client does not receive regular updates.
- Up until 2025, the NetExtender VPN client had a poor GUI.
- You have to uninstall the VPN client and reboot before you can update the VPN client. This applies even for minor updates.
Return on Investment
- The biggest impact is that it allowed employees to work remotely. Though, we are replacing VPN clients with other better methods.
- It allowed different vendors to support us remotely, which allowed them to better support our business.
- Like all VPN clients, it created a security concern by opening up a path to our internal network, so steps had to be taken to mitigate that risk.
