ContentProtect vs. Palo Alto Networks Advanced URL Filtering

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

Because of it's complexity, Palo may not be well suited for a small organization that may not have dedicated networking staff. But for a mid to large-sized enterprise, Palo shines.

Incentivized

• avoid employee time and resource waste
• Multi platform
• Content is protected

Incentivized

• Threat Detection and Prevention (Malwares, Un-Authorized Access)
• Out of the box patterns for threat detection
• Built in and Updated identification patterns
• Unified Dashboard/Alerting on anomaly

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

• Steep learning curve
• The top-down URL filtering match can sometimes be tricky and requires some expertise in setting up the desired policy

Incentivized

Palo support is excellent, and I have never had to wait when contacting them for support. One of the best support teams in the business, in my opinion.

Incentivized

ContentProtect helps increase productivity by blocking inappropriate or time wasting web content. With the powerful cloud-based administration tools you can make changes and see reports anywhere and anytime. Best part is it is available on all platforms and hence the product is also scalable. Loved it over any product in the current market

Incentivized

Palo Alto is a much much better product. detailed options and controls, more visibility, and usability. Better performance and durability.

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

• We stopped to looking for external content filtering after acquiring PA URL Filtering
• The dynamic updates help us to mitigate security issues caused by BAD URLs
• Palo Alto Networks Advanced URL Filtering is helping us to achieve the high reliability of the Network

Incentivized