Barracuda Content Shield (discontinued) vs. ContentProtect

Barracuda Content Shield is well suited to large companies with many employees that are based in many areas and have various aspects of their job that need them to be on the internet at all times and in many cases opening themselves to many threats. It may be less appropriate for small companies that are in individualized clusters

Incentivized

If you are looking for something relatively inexpensive to lock down specific computers, it would be a useful tool. If the computers themselves aren't too locked down, implementation and management shouldn't be too difficult.

Incentivized

• Easy to use
• Layout of program looks like an email so its easy to read and identify
• Helped many suspicious senders from getting into our system

Incentivized

• The client is relatively light weight and doesn't impact other applications.
• The client isn't easily bypassed, so the user's are kept under restrictions.
• The configuration is relatively simple and easy to deploy.

Incentivized

• Increased policy customization
• Filtering policy preferences
• Increased manual settings

Incentivized

• Our primary policy is a restricted list, so that does as advertised. We had one location that had blocks based on categories (adult, illegal, etc). We continually had issues with sites getting completely blocked due to unrelated content. For example, Yahoo had a beer ad on the page, alcohol was blocked, so Yahoo became blocked for the period of time that ad was displayed. We had this happen multiple times and eventually switched to a different solution at that location.
• I've had issues with their cloud portal not working. I don't have to edit our configuration often, but on numerous occasions, i was unable to get the configuration page to load after login, sometimes for days. The platform just wasn't stable when I needed it to be.
• We run many of our remote rooms as frozen (after logoff they reset to the image). This works fine most times, but when content protect needs a configuration change pushed down, someone needs to go 'thaw' the computers, download the updated configuration, and re-'freeze' the computer. It would be nice if that information was just dynamic from the cloud and didn't need to be pulled down.
• The categorization used for policies is very limited and not flexible or easily customizable.
• I could never get the usage reporting to work.

Incentivized

I think the program is easy to use, I think there are more functions it can have or better ability to customize the layout so it doesn't look so plain

Incentivized

I have only had to call twice for access issues but it has been overall a normal experience.

Incentivized

Barracuda Content Shield was compared to this product and in our opinion was more robust and cost effective for our growing firm. Barracuda allowed us to create filtering that worked for our firm and allowed us to make the customization easy so that all employees had access to what they needed and were not shut out.

Incentivized

At the time ContentProtect was selected, Forcepoint (Websense at the time) didn't have an inexpensive or cloud type product. The same can be said with Cisco, at that time. Recently, we have reevaluated and are going to be transitioning to Forcepoint's mobile client and removing ContentProtect from our environment. The cost is actually now less and we will be able to get both more dynamic control and also give us more detailed reporting on the traffic from clients.

Incentivized

• Increased Reporting Times
• Threat Training time increase
• Policy enforcement increased time

Incentivized

• It was a relatively inexpensive and simple solution when we needed one relatively quickly, which is a positive. The inexpensive price has kept it in the environment.
• The lack of reliable reporting has lead to the need for an alternate monitoring solution in a few cases. Network level reporting was used, which is a separate expense, configuration.
• Time has been lost waiting on the portal and then troubleshooting support tickets when sites that shouldn't have been blocked have been blocked. It has resulted in changes for locations that needed dynamic category filtering as opposed to a finite list.
• The blocking of sites based on add traffic or sub-sites (rather than just blocking that content like other solutions) has resulted in downtime during classes when those sites were listed in the lesson plan and had previously worked.

Incentivized