Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: security, firewall | Themes: The Internet, Networking, Laptops and Notebooks
- 1. The Urge to Miniaturize Networking Appliances is Pervasive
- 2. Yoggie Pico to the Rescue!
- 3. Yoggie Pico Security Components, Fit and Finish
- 4. Installing and Using the Yoggie Pico
- 5. Testing the Yoggie Pico Pro
- 6. Pico Pro Performance Results
- 7. Pico Pro Management
- 8. Yoggie Pico Pro: Conclusions and Recommendations
- 9. More on this topic
8. Yoggie Pico Pro: Conclusions and Recommendations
The Yoggie Pico Pro security appliance services enterprise networks, whereas the Yoggie Pico Personal best suits the consumer market. The Pico Pro retails for about $200 (with street prices as low as $130), while the plain Pico retails for $149 (street prices just under $100). The differences between the two products primarily involve the presence or absence of enterprise features: Pro offers VPN support and lets organizations host their own management servers; plain-vanilla supports neither of these things. Both versions are also subject to recurring annual $30 subscription charges for product updates and access to Yoggie service and support.
Although the Pico may appeal most strongly to the mobile computing crowd, there is something to be said for putting all of your security eggs into this one particular basket. As a single-source security solution, the Pico does make a strong candidate for company notebook computers assigned to mobile workers even though it also draws on USB power (and the notebook battery) for full-time operation. As with anything, you must weigh its costs and benefits carefully and reach your own conclusions, but there’s no denying that the Yoggie Pico Pro offers an appealing, single-source solution for all of today’s pressing information security needs and includes a sound security architecture along with its frequent updates and automated maintenance facilities.
We also found the Pico interesting because it didn’t appear to adversely affect Internet access or perceived responsiveness. Even though we measured an increase from tens to hundreds of milliseconds in latency figures, this was more than offset by the modest 10-20% boosts in download speed systems enjoyed when the Pico was in use. For convenience and for peace of mind, we like the Pico enough that after we surrender the Pico to the Tom’s Guide central office for further testing, that we plan to purchase one for each of our own notebook PCs.
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Nice, although running an OS that's actually secure (i.e. not windows) would certainly give you most of the same benefits...
Right... because OSX, all the Linux Distros, and BSD all come out of the box preconfigured with up to date antivirus, anti-spyware, traffic shaping, intrusion detection, and content filtering.
Or wait... maybe you're just saying that those OSes are all completely secure and don't need anything else... riiiiiight.
seems like a neat device, did you do any surfing to nether regions of the internet to see what kind of infections it could actally block?
That bit published by Google that malware can install just by visting a site is rather disturbing. Downloading and running a malware program is one thing, but just clicking on a link and getting infected should be blocked by a device like this. Does the pico block such attackS?
Or do I need to maintain my clean and dirty setups. One setup is only for known good sites or offline activity and it is unplugged while the dirty setup is online. Normally the dirty setup is clean, but the anti-virus software has been eaten before.
I purchased 2 of the Pico's (from Yoggie.com) which arrived yesterday. I bought it through their website because they have a promo right now where you get a 3 year license included in the purchase price. The setup and install went just like the review states - perfectly. Not a single problem and it went very quickly (I didn't get the certificate error like the reviewer).
My laptop performance after the install is way beyond what I had expected. Before installing the Pico, opening an Excel spreadsheet from a LAN drive took over 1 minute (with Norton 360 installed). After the Pico install and uninstall of Norton, opening the same Excel document took less than 5 seconds!!! Another performance boost that I noticed was when I wake up my laptop (after about 30 min of inactivity) - it used to take a long time to fully wake up to the point where it was usable again (at lease a min or more - depending on how long it was inactive), where it is virtually instantaneous now.
I've been raving about this little device all day. So far, it ranks among my top 2 gadget purchases ever (right along side my Harmony Remote).
I highly recommend it.
I would be interested in finding out of two computers on the same switch are effected by the USB device. Sometimes I transfer documents between computers on the same network and I would think USB speeds are a lot slower than the Gigabit network interface cards.
I have been using the SOHO Gatekeeper Pro for about 4 months. As an idea it sounds great. Funtionally it is not a practical enterprise solution. For example : whenever the AV database gets updated it slows any function to a crowl. In several instances it just slows browsing, email without even showing that Yoggie's CPU is busy.
Support is horrible. They provide fixes that are broken, in other word no fix. Then they fix the second problem and the support replies that we fixed the issue. While the initial issue is still there.
Additionally, when the automatic update from version 1.3.9 to 1.4.0 they broke the email POP checking and they do not want to fix the issue.
My final thoughts are that it is an unstrustworthy imature security company with bad business practices. Their moto must be "We can break your Yoggie any time we like and we will not support you or fix the issue".
My recomendation is do not buy any equipment from them.
Sorry, but I agree with the previous poster. Access to the internet was very slow after using this devices. Also, the screen snapshots show that the device was NEVER tested against any virus or malware. It's a cumulative graph that can't be refreshed, and they showed ZERO attacks. The device also does not allow any initial secured authentication such as initial logins for things like Yahoo, Gmail,Gdocs, etc with having to be disabled. It must try to block redirected HTTPS authentication. Netflix, wireless printing also do not work. And the "automatic" firmware upgrade to 1.4.0 from 1.3.9 took 50 emails back and forth to tech support to fix. Once it was complete, if fixed none of the above issues.
I bought the Yoggie because it promised to speed up my computer by allowing me to remove Norton which made my pc slow. It actually made surfing the internet slower and receiving emails took for ever.
updates made it worse.