Save Money with pfSense Plus as your Cloud Firewall, VPN and Router Solution

welcome to our webinar on how to save

money with the very best open source

driven firewall vpn gateway and router

solution for cloud needs hi my name is

christian mcdonald and i am a software

developer here at netgate working on the

pfsense team and i have over 10 years of

experience deploying and managing

networks based on pfsense software i'm

here to give you an overview of psense

plus software which is of course

available here on microsoft azure and i

want to make sure that you have a good

understanding of what the product is

and what the product does and also

outlines some potential use cases that

you might want to consider for your

organization and of course why we think

pfsense plus software is the very best

open source driven firewall vpn gateway

and routing solution for almost any

cloud need so let's jump in pfsense plus

software is an open source driven

firewall vpn gateway and routing

solution that can be deployed anywhere

pfsense plus software is netgate's

commercial version of the pfsense open

source project software

netgate has been the project steward and

its primary developer for the last nine

years of its 15-year life

so nobody knows the code better than we

do furthermore netgate provides the only

officially tested and branded pfsense

plus software available in the cloud the

best thing about pfsense plus software

is that it provides the very same

functionality as other leading

commercial firewalls at a fraction of

the price though we'll get into pricing

a little bit later

pfsense software is highly regarded for

its feature set ease of use and of

course its reliability

the software has been downloaded over

three million times and currently has

over 1500

active azure deployments over the last

six years

what you should take away from this

diagram is that pf sense plus software

can be deployed at virtually any edge

network location including the virtual

private cloud the home office the remote

or branch office corporate headquarters

or even data centers

while we are of course focused on the

cloud for this webinar you might have

secure networking needs at other

locations and you might want to consider

deploying a single firewall vpn and

routing solution network wide with no

issues and most of our customers are

doing exactly this

so let's take a closer look at some of

the commonly used capabilities of

pfsense plus software routers are of

course central for the movement of

traffic across the internet and pfsense

plus software has robust support for

multiple routing protocols policy-based

routing concurrent ipv4 and ipv6

handling and much more

virtual private networks or vpns are

essential for the secure movement of

traffic across public and untrusted

networks and pfsense software has widely

used capabilities including operating as

a vpn concentrator which is essentially

being your own vpn provider acting as a

vpn endpoint at remote network locations

and even serving in site-to-site vpn

connectivity furthermore pfsense plus

software can be configured to use ipsec

openvpn and even wireguard the three

most widely deployed vpn protocols in

use today perhaps though its greatest

strength is as a firewall and pfsense

plus software is an extremely powerful

and flexible firewall solution capable

of covering next-gen firewall needs

including stateful packet inspection

geoip blocking captive portal time-based

rules connection limits

anti-spoofing and in addition powerful

attack prevention needs including

intrusion detection and prevention layer

7 application detection ip blacklisting

and much more

and finally the product is rounded out

with a full complement of network

services including dynamic dns of which

we currently support over 40 different

dynamic dns providers dhcp services

including dhcp server and dhcp relay in

case you already have dhcp services on

your network and finally dns forwarding

and resolving using unbound in addition

you get all the tools necessary for

configuration user management

authentication security fault tolerance

and of course system monitoring and

reporting

now let's shift our attention to the

very bottom of this slide it's not that

the above features are necessarily

unique to pf sense plus software in fact

you can probably find some or even all

of these features in other secure

networking offers however what is

special here is that all of the features

mentioned herein are included 100

at any capacity that you choose for one

per instance cost here on microsoft

azure

there are no feature up charges there

are no connection capacity up charges

there are no hidden or extra licensing

fees the only thing that can change your

per instance cost here on microsoft

azure is first of course the size of the

compute instance that you've chosen or

the optional edition of one of our

world-class technical support offerings

that's it it's simple and it's

straightforward and we think that once

you start to compare our pricing to the

pricing of others you will quickly see

that not only are we hard to beat

feature set wise but we're also hard to

beat price to performance wise as well

it's just a fantastic

value proposition

well that last slide can be a lot to

absorb if you're new to the world of

secure cloud-based networking but let me

give you a simple set of use cases that

might make it more digestible any

organization business educational

institution government agency or even

service providers who want to run secure

cloud-based workloads or applications on

top of microsoft azure should consider

these three use cases

which are typically voiced as

i need to connect on-site i.t

infrastructure to a workload or

application in the cloud or i need to

protect my cloud-based workloads or

applications from harm

or i need to provide secure remote

access to a cloud-based workload or

application

if these are the use cases that you're

considering for your organization then

pfsense plus software is the solution

for you now let's talk more specifically

about business drivers that might be

affecting you right now

the pandemic has changed the world

arguably forever even though the concept

of work from home wasn't novel in early

2020

many organizations seemingly overnight

shifted their workforce from five

percent work from home to 95 percent

this shift has placed an incredible

burden on our network how we monitor our

networks and how we secure our networks

from prying eyes damage and even

protecting our users from ransomware for

the sake of brevity i'm not going to go

through each one of these example use

cases in detail but know that each one

of these use cases all comes down to

secure networking both to from and

within the cloud a central strength of

the pfsense plus software

and of course these needs are only going

to be increasing over time

the global pandemic will hopefully

eventually come to an end but the notion

of a full return to the corporate office

has likely been altered forever let me

reiterate that pfsense plus software has

been widely deployed across every

vertical and even every continent yes

even including antarctica with over 3

million software downloads across homes

remote or branch offices small and

medium-sized businesses educational

institutions and even government

agencies you can be sure that pf sense

plus software is highly trusted here are

just a few examples of

name brand corporate government and

educational institutions here in north

america that are using pfsense plus

software

we are especially proud of our u.s

government civilian and defense agencies

including the federal bureau of

investigation the department of health

and human services the department of

homeland security and even the national

aeronautics and space administration

and this should bear witness to the

caliber of product that we have here so

why specifically do customers choose

pfsense plus software over the

alternatives

there are a few key reasons which we've

discovered through our customer surveys

first our customers love that we are

major contributors to the open source

software movement and that the core of

the product is fully code inspectable

number two our customers love that the

product is as feature rich as anything

else on the market number three ease of

use is a major calling card for pfsense

plus software not only does it have a

battle tested and intuitive user

interface but our documentation which is

available right on our website and open

to the world is second to none in terms

of its depth and breadth of available

information and finally it's just

unbeatable in it in terms of its initial

cost and total cost of ownership

for these reasons we consistently rank

at top across a number of comparison

sites including g2

it central station and others

and here is a recent ranking where we

landed number one in the world for open

source firewalls

you can get started on microsoft azure

for as low as eight cents per hour which

is about a hundred dollars per month we

of course offer a 30 day free trial

which allows you to come up to speed

learn about networking and security and

even prototype your specific application

and configuration requirements

and there is a range of azure virtual

machine instance tiers that can meet

even the most demanding cloud

performance and throughput needs

now let's take a closer look at a

customer here on microsoft azure that is

using pfsense plus software to address

its cloud secure networking needs

ecs tuning a 21 million dollar

automotive supply chain company serving

major german brands needed both robust

bgp edge routing fronting its

cloud-based e-commerce workloads in

addition to scalable ipsec vpn

connection handling as a result of

worker spread due to the global pandemic

pfsense plus software gives them an easy

to deploy easy to scale reliable and

cost-effective solution that allows them

to focus their resources on their

e-commerce backend while being assured

that their cloud routing and vpn

performance needs would be covered well

we've covered a lot and pretty quickly

but as a quick recap here are seven

benefits to you as a microsoft azure

solution customer number one psense plus

software is the number one open source

driven secure networking solution in the

world

number two pfsense plus software is the

number one most cost effective secure

networking solution bar none number

three the software is proven the world

over for fifteen years running with over

three million software downloads number

four it's simple to install configure

and manage number five it's fully

featured with no tricky fee structure

number six it's extensible from azure to

any location that you might need and

finally netgate offers world-class

stellar rated technical support options

for those that might need it we all know

that the cloud is quickly replacing your

data centers and the applications within

them at a dizzying pace and if you're

watching this webinar you probably have

secure networking needs for your

cloud-based workloads and applications

so while you are spending your energy

and time focused on moving your

applications and workloads to microsoft

azure leave it to netgate and

pfsenseplus software to make the secure

networking part frictionless and cost

effective and one last point you don't

need to know all of this intimately we

are here to help you our tac engineers

are outstanding and our customer

satisfaction is

exceptional

even though pfsense plus software is

really easy to use and reliable things

still happen and when they do we want to

make sure that you're not left

flat-footed so make sure to take

advantage of one of our tac support

subscriptions and also know that our

product documentation is stellar it gets

tapped by thousands of customers every

single day and finally we are super

proud of our social media and our forum

communities you can find the official

netgate forum at forum.netgate.com

you can also find a very vibrant

community on reddit and even a user

group on facebook all of which contain

really knowledgeable and willing to help

members

if you have any questions about what

we've presented or would like to stay up

to date on the latest pfsense plus

software development or have specific

use case or solution questions please

contact us at the link below we love to

help thank you for listening to this

webinar again my name is christian

mcdonald and i and the entire team here

at netgate wish you full success