Cloudflare Zero Trust Services vs. Sophos Cloud Web Gateway (discontinued)

I wanted to securely connect to my servers without getting tracked by malicious attackers, even though I was on public Wi-Fi. Security was my top priority, and I also wanted a setup that was easy and quick to start and provided great network performance. Cloudflare's Zero trust matches my criteria for becoming my first choice.

Incentivized

Sophos Secure Web Gateway is great for almost any business that needs an easily-manageable proxy server. We're a medium-sized enterprise, but the product would work great for much larger companies as well. The only real limitations would be hardware resources, but it isn't that intensive. The administration of it is very intuitive, and it was quick to set up. Where it might not make sense is across multiple sites, unless all internet traffic is funneled through one place. It would be a bit complicated to maintain multiple setups.

Incentivized

• Block access to known bad, risky, or unwanted destinations at the DNS or HTTP level.
• Excellent protection for remote users.
• Best in class browser isolation techniques.

Incentivized

• When IT Admins need to deploy virtually.
• When IT Admins want to have high availability without an extra cost (via the Virtual Appliance Deployment).
• When IT Admins want to control and give the internet fair use within the organization.

Incentivized

• Cloudflare still need to improve CASB direction to complete set of SASE tools.
• More integrations with the third-party agents to check device posture in the Zero Trust framework.
• More granularity in firewall rules for full replacement of on-premise solutions.

Incentivized

• Administrator Permissions: There's not enough granularity on the administrative side. We ran into an issue where we wanted to restrict junior admins from being able to see traffic per user. But in doing so, it also prevented them from adusting some other settings they had to have access to, like setting exceptions for sites.
• CA Database: I occasionally run into issues where the list of certificate authorities in the appliance is not up to date, and I have to manually add a CA. These aren't rare, never-heard-of authorities, either, but they are usually subsidiaries of one of the major ones.
• Feedback: Sometimes it takes some good detective skills to track down why a legitimate site isn't working. It's often because of content hosted elsewhere (images, for example), but the reports aren't always clear as to what actually gets blocked. It takes some trial and error sometimes to unblock something that should be okay for our business.

Incentivized

Within a few hours, new engineers are trained in basic tasks and are quite happy they are able to resolve issues independently. After SSO is configured, onboarding is as simple as signing into m365 via a web browser popup.

Incentivized

Good chat support from the portal for basic questions and minor issues. The enterprise support line is provided as well.

Cloudflare was both the most feature-rich and cost-effective of comparisons. Presales engagement understood our challenges and was keen to solve them.

Incentivized

Sophos Secure Web Gateway has flexible pricing and deployment options. It offers a huge range of categorization options and they also pull web categorization info from other services

Incentivized

• The cost of Cloudflare Zero trust is much lower, hence reducing spending on infrastructure security.
• The Network performance is improved thanks to Warp protocol.
• Requires less maintenance and hence saves time.

Incentivized

• We have not had a single instance of malware since installing Web Gateway. We have other ways to prevent infections and attacks, of course, so this is just one tool in the box, but we had a handful before this from people visiting sites they should not have. Web Gateway has prevented those, at least.
• There was some pushback initially as users had to deal with some business sites not working (usually due to CA problems). After the initial growing pains, however, we've seen very few other problems.
• The appliance updates itself, in the middle of the night, so that reduces some overhead and planned downtime.

Incentivized