Click for spec details
When you start your small business from home, to support the business you build simple home network using home wireless router. When the business grows, the requirements of a better and more secure network environment exist. When more computers connect to the network grow as well, the more network resources accessed and the more reliable network environment is required too. Your home wireless router is likely not suitable anymore to support your growing business. It is therefore you need to replace your environment using a small business class router.
In selecting a small business router, you need to make sure that your router can support the VPN secure tunneling – a site to site communication if your network would expand to more branches in the future. Moreover, the router should also support the remote access by mobile users or travelling executives who require remote connection to the office.
The last requirement but not the least, your small business class router should support superior protection against any emerging internet threats. This is important since your business information must be protected as secure as possible for possibly hacked.
Cisco RV-220W is a small business class router that you can consider to install for your growing business. It’s an internet security router that is suitable for most small businesses or home businesses.
What this Product Does
Cisco RV220W is a small business router – a compact internet security router for small businesses looking for affordable and secure router to protect their network.
High Speed
The Cisco RV220W internet security router includes 4xgigabit Ethernet ports to support your gigabit-enabled server and computers for high speed data transfer or any other high-intensive bandwidth applications. Connecting the gigabit enabled ports you should use high performance Cat5e UTP cable. Or you can add one or more Gigabit Switches to expand the network larger.
Providing wireless access to the network is a must today to allow the employee with their mobile devices stay in touch to the network to keep productive when they away from their desks. Cisco RV220W is powered by the latest wireless 802.11n technology with dual band feature. Unfortunately it is not a simultaneous dual band, but selectable one. It means that the router can only work in a single band either 2.4GHz or 5GHz band in a time. If your wireless clients contain mix devices which operate in both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, you cannot expect to connect them all at the same time. If all of the wireless clients operate in 5GHz band, this is great so you can select the router to work in 5GHz band – clean band that is less interference than the 2.4GHz band. The performance of the network would be great too to support your business applications.
Hybrid VPN
Typically traditional home routers only support the VPN pass-through, meaning the router can only pass the VPN protocols not natively supports the VPN. But Cisco RV220W supports hybrid VPN with IPSec (IP Security) and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to allow you create up to 25 IPSec secure inter-site communications and up to 5 SSL secure remote tunneling to your network.
Advanced Security
Being capable of segregating the network to meet your business security policy is very essential. In some cases you need to create different network virtually based on security or groups of users. Cisco RV220W with its 4xGigabit switch supports Virtual LAN (VLAN) to allow you create up to 16 active VLANs. The router can support the inter-VLANs communication too, so you don’t need layer 3 devices to perform that.
The other similar VLAN for wireless is that the router supports multiple SSIDs to allow you create virtually separate wireless networks with different passwords. And the good thing is that the router supports SSID to VLAN mapping with wireless client isolation. VLANs and SSIDs are great solution for security reason, but if the requirements of creating security boundaries do not exist you don’t need to configure the router for that, because it will just increase the processing power of your router.
Other standard features like other home routers support including NAT and SPI, the RV220W does support as well. The router supports optional Cisco Protect Link – a web cloud-based security services. But this is not free; you need to purchase a service plan in a yearly basis. Security costs you lots of money but it is worth to implement to protect your business information assets. Information is your business assets that must be well protected like other business assets.
Pros:
- Supports hybrid VPN
- Supports multiple VLANs and SSIDs
- Supports optional Cisco Protect Link – a dynamic web filter services
Cons:
- Doesn’t support simultaneous dual band
- Doesn’t include a USB port to allow you host a shared printer
Click here for RV220W manufacturers spec details.
Alternate Solutions
Netgear SRX5308 Business-class Firewall Security
The Netgear SRX5308 firewall appliance is a high performance small business router featuring a hardware-accelerated data flow architecture that allows for 1Gbps of Stateful firewall throughput. It’s a VPN router that supports SSL and IPSec secure tunneling. It also supports VLAN and includes four Gigabit LAN Ethernet ports and Gigabit WAN port for load balancing or fail-over.
Unfortunately this small business router doesn’t support wireless access point, you need to add one to provide wireless access to the mobile devices.
Click here for spec details Netgear SRX5308 small business-class firewall security.
SonicWall TZ 210 series – security Appliance
The SonicWall TZ 210 series is a small business router – a security appliance which is easy to use and setup as well as easy to manage. The appliance includes dual Gigabit WAN ports and five fast Ethernet configurable LAN ports. The configurable Ethernet ports are flexible, you can customize the ports as a second LAN, a second WAN, a WLAN or even as the DMZ port.
The good thing with this small business router is that it includes the latest wireless N access point to let you provide wireless access to wireless clients. And it includes dual USB ports for 3G and analog modem for failover system.
Click here for SonicWall TZ210 series spec details.
By Ki Grinsing
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