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Forum Discussion
Is Netgear Armor worth it?
I bought an Orbi AX6000 (RBK853) recently and earlier today, got an email from Netgear offering me 35% off a one year subscription (making it about $45/year) being a "Happy 1-Week Anniversary" of hav...
dtay wrote:I bought an Orbi AX6000 (RBK853) recently and earlier today, got an email from Netgear offering me 35% off a one year subscription (making it about $45/year) being a "Happy 1-Week Anniversary" of having it. My question is - is Armor worth it? All our laptops have Malwarebytes installed together with Microsoft's own anti-virus software.
It's really a difficult question to answer. It "depends".
A real example, in one environment where I have a Netgerar Router w/ Armor enabled...
The router (w/ armor) blocked a particular URL that Windows Defender allowed.
After researching the URL, I found it was a 'fake' microsoft website asking for credit card info etc.
While it's not perfect (sometimes it may block legit sites), it's VERY rare...
Over the past 2 months w/ 4 daily users, I've had 2 blocked sites that were legit, but arguably no harm in blocking, they were google APIs sending site usage data.
For the userbase I've had 7 "bad" pages blocked that local software on the computers did not catch.
So for that environment, I think Armor was a great deal.
Another thing to consider, if you are looking for alternative AV software, the armor subscription does come with Bit Defender Total Security for each computer you have for free. So if you plan on using that on at least 2 computers, the Armor subscription pays for itself.
To be fair, the implementation is not the most pollished for the Armor Web GUI to manage things, and does need some work and fixes, but the web-proxing underneath does work reasonably well, and they finally added the ability to allow a blocked URL if you believe it's really legit. Historically you would have to put in a ticket in wait 2 days..now you just add it to the "unblock" list.
So not sure if this answered your question directly (it really depends on your situation and security posture) but I consider Armor another layer of protecting users from themselves, and at that it works reasonably well..in addition to free Bit Defender software for Windows and Mac.
Just my 2 cents.
rinthos wrote:
dtay wrote:I bought an Orbi AX6000 (RBK853) recently and earlier today, got an email from Netgear offering me 35% off a one year subscription (making it about $45/year) being a "Happy 1-Week Anniversary" of having it. My question is - is Armor worth it? All our laptops have Malwarebytes installed together with Microsoft's own anti-virus software.
It's really a difficult question to answer. It "depends".
A real example, in one environment where I have a Netgerar Router w/ Armor enabled...
The router (w/ armor) blocked a particular URL that Windows Defender allowed.
After researching the URL, I found it was a 'fake' microsoft website asking for credit card info etc.
While it's not perfect (sometimes it may block legit sites), it's VERY rare...
Over the past 2 months w/ 4 daily users, I've had 2 blocked sites that were legit, but arguably no harm in blocking, they were google APIs sending site usage data.
For the userbase I've had 7 "bad" pages blocked that local software on the computers did not catch.
So for that environment, I think Armor was a great deal.
Another thing to consider, if you are looking for alternative AV software, the armor subscription does come with Bit Defender Total Security for each computer you have for free. So if you plan on using that on at least 2 computers, the Armor subscription pays for itself.
To be fair, the implementation is not the most pollished for the Armor Web GUI to manage things, and does need some work and fixes, but the web-proxing underneath does work reasonably well, and they finally added the ability to allow a blocked URL if you believe it's really legit. Historically you would have to put in a ticket in wait 2 days..now you just add it to the "unblock" list.
So not sure if this answered your question directly (it really depends on your situation and security posture) but I consider Armor another layer of protecting users from themselves, and at that it works reasonably well..in addition to free Bit Defender software for Windows and Mac.
Just my 2 cents.
Thanks for analysis! Really appreciate it!