Score: 3.31

Editor’s note: This is a summary of our testing of this product, for a full rundown of how it fared in our testing across 10 UTM categories, please see our full coverage.

The Proventia MX5010 is an amazingly fast IPS that outclassed the competition when it came to detecting the attacks we threw at it. Unfortunately, that world-class IPS is housed in a firewall and sporting management system that are not up to enterprise standards. Although our scorecard ranks the Proventia MX5010 high because of its performance and IPS catch rate, few enterprises would feel comfortable with such a primitive firewall at the edge or core of their networks.

The ISS heritage in high-end IPS has been packaged into the Proventia MX5010 with an absolute minimum of controls, probably too few for any enterprise manager to comfortably deploy this in front of a server farm or protecting thousands of users. But more important, the firewall in the Proventia MX5010 is just too oversimplified and uncontrollable for the complex security policy we expect to see in enterprise environments.