Versa Networks Outperforms Cisco in CyberRatings Cloud Firewall Evaluation

December 2, 2022

CyberRatings.org has completed an independent test of eight market leading security vendors in its first-ever Cloud Network Firewall comparative evaluation. Forcepoint, Fortinet and Juniper’s test reports were published earlier in the year, all with ‘AAA’ ratings. In this latest release of test reports, Check Point and Versa Networks received a ‘AAA’ rating. Palo Alto Networks received an ‘AA,’ Sophos an ‘A,’ and Cisco ‘CC.’

The test covered capabilities considered essential in a firewall including basic routing, access control, SSL / TLS decryption, threat prevention (exploits), evasion, performance, stability and reliability, and management. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the public cloud service chosen to run the test. Ratings were calculated using a scale from 0 to 800.

To achieve its ‘AAA’ rating, the CyberRatings.org reported that Versa’s product, for example, blocked 35 out of 35 evasion techniques and 977 out of 977 exploits.

Key Findings include:

Cloud services assume a shared security model, where cloud providers are responsible for the infrastructure and customers are responsible for securing the applications running on the infrastructure.

Roughly 80% of web traffic is encrypted and firewall decryption is not on by default: Firewalls will not see/block attacks delivered via (encrypted) HTTPS unless configured to do so.

Security vendors are used to controlling the platform on which their products are installed. In the cloud, they do not have that control; vendors are learning how to operate under these new conditions and there will be challenges.

Supply Chain attacks are on the rise. Using the cloud means relying on third parties to maintain software supply chain integrity. APIs, code reuse, open-source libraries, not maintained code, and other shared resources introduce unknown risks.

Security effectiveness scores ranged from 27% to 100%. The security effectiveness tests verified how effectively the firewall protected control network access, applications, and users while preventing threats (exploits and evasions), blocking malicious traffic while under extended load, and remaining resistant to false positives. Exploit block rates ranged from 88.3% to 100%. All products achieved 100% for resistance to evasion techniques.

“Security is your problem, not Amazon’s,” said Vikram Phatak, CEO of CyberRatings.org. “If you are migrating your data center to the cloud, create a plan for securing it,” Phatak added. “And if you needed a firewall for your data center, you probably need one for your cloud deployment.”

“Versa is a proven leader in Cloud Network Firewall, and we are proud of this achievement and validation by this CyberRatings evaluation – the first-of-its-kind competitive comparison in the industry,” said Kelly Ahuja, Chief Executive Officer of Versa Networks. “Our Versa Cloud Network Firewall not only scored a top ‘AAA’ rating in all categories tested, it also proved to be the industry’s best price per Mbps over all seven other competitors evaluated. Companies often claim leadership, but it’s important validation from organizations such as CyberRatings which is so important in proving who really leads the pack. With the acceleration to cloud, Cloud Network Firewalls are essential for enterprises to connect their users/devices to their applications/workloads while protecting their users, devices, data, workloads, and applications. This report shows that enterprise can rely on the market-leading Cloud Network Firewall from Versa.”

“We are proud to receive a top ‘AAA’ CyberRatings evaluation across all test categories of threat prevention, SSL/TLS functionalities, performance, routing, and policy enforcement,” said Apurva Mehta, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Versa Networks. “At the same time, we are not surprised. Ninety percent of our customers already use our security capabilities, a testament to our rating. This is possible due to our monumental ground-up design of the platform from day one focusing on security and performance.”

There are different ways consumers can purchase security products for the cloud. The individual test reports reflect the bring-your-own-license model while the comparative report illustrates the pay-as-you-go pricing. Both pricing models provide consumers with options to compare pricing on items important to their own organizations.