ContentWatch in Salt Lake City, Utah offers ContentProtect, a web content filtering solution.
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Symantec Edge Secure Gateway
Score 4.0 out of 10
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Symantec Secure Web Gateway (SWG) protects organizations across the web, social media, applications, and mobile networks. SWG acts as a proxy between users and the internet to identify malicious websites and payloads and to control access to sensitive content. SWG solutions consolidate a broad feature-set to authenticate users, filter web traffic, identify cloud application usage, provide data loss prevention, deliver threat prevention, and ensure visibility into encrypted traffic.
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.
In conjunction with Active Directory, we can allow or deny access to the internet very quickly. We can also determine the level of access to the internet.
To satisfy our executive requirements, we can provide regular reports on internet usage.
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.
On occasion, content analysis needs some tweaking. Specifically, when huge files our downloaded.
For our organization using cloud-based applications and services is very discouraged.
However, the universe seems to be trending towards cloud-based offerings.
It may be reassuring if Symantec ProxySG and Advanced Secure Gateway (ASG) could enhance protection in dealing with cloud services, particularly in protecting data.
We have submitted support request to Symantec ProxySG and Advanced Secure Gateway (ASG). In all cases, responses have been timely, and very comprehensive.
The support staff is very knowledgeable and does not hesitate to involve expert resources as required.
We have never had an unsolved case with Symantec ProxySG and Advanced Secure Gateway (ASG).
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.
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.
With the advent of the Symantec ProxySG and Advanced Secure Gateway (ASG), we have reduced by 95% the number of internal security incidents and events.
As a result, we have reduced the effort and cost of investigating security incidents.
Knock on wood, as a result, and we have never had any data or security breaches.
