A laptop in an airport is on somebody else's network. FowlGuard decides what it can reach, inspects what leaves it, and keeps the answer identical to the one it would get at a desk.
Zero-trust access, web filtering and data-loss prevention, on infrastructure you own. No vendor cloud in the path of your traffic — which is also why there is no vendor outage in it.
A legacy VPN puts a device on the network and trusts it from then on. FowlGuard resolves what a person's groups allow at connect time, server-side, and routes only that — so a compromised laptop reaches the two subnets its owner needed rather than the estate.
Connections take a direct peer-to-peer path where the network permits one and fall back to a server route where it does not, so a hostile café network degrades instead of failing.
Categories, hostnames and keywords, scoped to a person or a group and evaluated first-match. When two rules overlap there is one answer, you can see which rule gave it, and you can move it above the other if that was wrong.
Any rule runs report-only until you say otherwise. Nobody should discover a policy by being cut off by it.
Card numbers, national identifiers, keys and credentials are graded across four sensitivity tiers and checked against their own check digits — so a random sixteen-digit string is not an incident, and a real card number is.
An alert records the detector and the count, never the value. An alert queue that quoted card numbers would recreate the leak it exists to prevent.
Describe an intent — or the organisation — and get a complete, valid proposal back, using only the groups and categories your tenant actually has.
It never applies anything. Every suggestion arrives switched off and report-only, because a model that mistook report for block would fail in the direction that matters.
The full SASE suites are priced and staffed for the Fortune 500 — months of deployment before a single rule takes effect. The lightweight mesh tools connect devices beautifully and stop there: no filtering, no data-loss controls, nothing to hand an auditor.
Most organisations are neither, and end up keeping a VPN nobody trusts because the alternatives are a programme of work or a partial answer.
| Legacy VPN | Mesh tools | SASE suites | FowlGuard | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zero-trust access | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Web filtering | Bolt-on | No | Yes | Built in |
| Data-loss prevention | No | No | Yes | Built in |
| Time to first rule | Days | Minutes | Weeks+ | An afternoon |
| Runs on your own kit | Yes | Partly | No | Yes |
| Global scrubbing edge | No | No | Yes | Your regions |
If you need a hundred-city scrubbing edge with carrier peering, the large suites are the honest answer and we will say so. We are built for the tier underneath — expected to pass the same audits with a fraction of the staff.
Stand up the control plane on a host you choose, enrol a few devices, and watch what a policy would have done before it does it to anyone.