Cisco Secure Web Appliance (formerly Cisco WSA) vs Smoothwall SWG

Likelihood to Recommend

We have both scenarios where we can describe that. For example, in the HQ, where we have about 3,000 users, Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliance is the ideal solution, because we can consolidate all the Internet access, policies, rules, etc. in the same box. However, if you have small offices with a few users, it's hard to justify one big and expensive box that could cost more than the whole office infrastructure.

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Eduardo Viero

IT Infrastructure Specialist

RANDON S.AAutomotive, 5001-10,000 employees

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Smoothwall SWG is very suitable in companies where there is a lot of staff and power to distribute the bandwidth by areas and give priority to the staff that requires better service. It's also well suited for business that require protection of their data and services as it is constantly monitoring the network and does not let them enter dangerous sites.

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germary zambrano

jefe del departamento de informatica

ministerio de educacionComputer & Network Security, 1-10 employees

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Pros

SMA gave us central control over multiple servers, simplifying management.
Performance of the Appliance VM exceeded that of our old physical appliance-based solution.
Convenient licensing for virtualized environments that allows easy scaling.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Libraries Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Real-time IP filtering is very favorable. That helps limit and restrict prohibited content.
Elaboration of personalized reports of the activities or pages that users visit to make new blocking rules to the pages most visited by users that may damage the functioning of the servers.

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germary zambrano

jefe del departamento de informatica

ministerio de educacionComputer & Network Security, 1-10 employees

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Cons

The default metrics on the dashboard visualization are not that useful. It is not much customizable too. Some of the dashboard features like load, volume, etc. can have a hide option.
The false negatives are more than false positives. A lot of the times, it verdicts the same email as malicious and non-malicious. This can be reduced.

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Kuntal Das

Security Analyst Graduate Intern

University of Colorado DenverHigher Education, 5001-10,000 employees

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It is necessary for them to have more material or a community that can help expand knowledge about this software so users can use 100% of their tools.

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germary zambrano

jefe del departamento de informatica

ministerio de educacionComputer & Network Security, 1-10 employees

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Usability

Cisco Secure Web Appliance (formerly Cisco WSA) 9.0

Based on 1 answer

Because it's one of those products you almost don't realize it exists from the end user. From the administrator perspective, you can do everything on its web interface and it's very intuitive to manage, once you know the concepts behind identities, acls, etc. Also, once you build the control structure, I mean, you link 'local' groups with your own Active Directory groups, as we did here, you don't need to be managing those things on the appliance itself.

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Eduardo Viero

IT Infrastructure Specialist

RANDON S.AAutomotive, 5001-10,000 employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Support Rating

Cisco Secure Web Appliance (formerly Cisco WSA) 7.0

Based on 4 answers

Our experience with Cisco's support was terrible. Other than the fact that they don't respond to service-related emails with urgency, they also keep on changing the policies that affected us. Recently, they came up with a new look for the same software, which was insanely slow. Renewal of keys for the old interface took months. Overall, the support was not very friendly from the users' point of view.

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Kuntal Das

Security Analyst Graduate Intern

University of Colorado DenverHigher Education, 5001-10,000 employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Alternatives Considered

At home I have a McAfee service that does similar tasks and helps manage the users of my internet. McAfee seems more user friendly and easier to set exceptions.

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Verified User

Professional in Corporate

Machinery Company, 10,001+ employees

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Smoothwall SWG has many tools similar to pfSense but in my opinion I like the graphical environment of smoothwall swg more. It is more didactic and simple to use for new users. Also pfSense lacks the tools for monitoring in real time and the elaboration of reports that helps to perform statistics on sites visited.

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germary zambrano

jefe del departamento de informatica

ministerio de educacionComputer & Network Security, 1-10 employees

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Return on Investment

Security! Security! Security! We are financial company that work with very sensitive information. A lot of unsafe traffic was blocked on the Cisco IronPort WSA over years of using it. We did not earn on it but absolutely sure that we did not lose 'gazillion' of dollars being infected or scammed.
Easy to configure and use, no need to teach new personnel how work with this product (hopefully saving time = saving money).
Unfortunately the price of license subscription made financial managers push IT dept. to look for something cheaper.

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Valery Mezentsau

System Administrator

Van Ru Credit CorporationFinancial Services, 501-1000 employees

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This software helps a lot and is very economical, since it is free and it can be installed in equipment with low performance. That is of importance to companies with little budget or who are just starting out in the market.

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germary zambrano

jefe del departamento de informatica

ministerio de educacionComputer & Network Security, 1-10 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Entry-level set up fee?

No

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No