Barracuda Content Shield vs. Symantec WebFilter / Intelligence Services

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

In a large environment, this is the perfect system. If you do not have constant changes, it easily becomes a system you drop in place and rarely have to think about. Our units have been rock solid and have never experienced any unexpected downtime, and upgrades are just a couple button clicks to deploy, or roll back. For small offices, with minimal traffic this may be using a sledgehammer to put in a push pin. It will work great, but the devices is likely over engineered for small offices (<50 people). That being said, price-wise it's still a great solution when compared to competing products and being from Symantec, you know it's going to be around and support for the long term.

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

• Almost real time protection from all ongoing threats with their DLA inspection
• Great visibility into web filtering policies using the dashboards and reports
• No patching or downloads needed, immediate protection is provided as clients are always cloud connected

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• The admin interface would be better off not using Java
• Setting up SSL properly can be a bit challenging
• Could really use a better source for training, like a library of how-to videos

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 really like the system, it's easy to use and mostly intuitive. I would have gone 10/10, but the management interface uses Java, and that seems to always make things a bit harder to start. Once everything is loaded and running, it's great - but it does require me to maintain a compatible version of Java on the machine I use to access the system, I'd be much happier with some kind of HTML5 interface. I also deducted 1 point for the functionality of the refer filter - it works as expected, but if the site isn't coded with the correct refer header, like Microsoft's site - then some page elements get stripped and pages only render about 98% correctly. I know that's not in Symantec's list of responsibilities, but having a filter that doesn't fully understand CDNs is worth the 1 point ding.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I've had exactly 1 problem in 8 years, I contacted support via the customer portal, less than an hour later I found myself in a screen share with a support tech who not only fixed my configuration error, but also took the time to ask about my usage and offered some great tips on changes. It was just one support incident, but I was impressed by the speed of response to a non-critical issue as well as the depth of product knowledge the support engineer had.

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

Symantec WebFilter / Intelligence Services solution was a simple 1U appliance that does everything we need, compared to the Forcepoint solution which required a virtual appliance, a database server, a log server, and a management server - the licensing costs alone make the Symantec WebFilter / Intelligence Services solution a clear winner. The Forcepoint solution is really good, it just requires such a big footprint without delivering much beyond what the Symantec WebFilter / Intelligence Services solution does with a single unit.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Boosts business productivity with having secured systems
• Globally available threat protection adhering to our own security policies
• User may sometime find it difficult to deal with - so there can be a feature to make it more user friendly in terms of user experience. That is a bit of negative we have seen.

Incentivized