ContentWatch in Salt Lake City, Utah offers ContentProtect, a web content filtering solution.
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Untangle NG Firewall
Score 9.3 out of 10
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Untangle NG Firewall is an open-source firewall and gateway security platform. It offers a free core firewall platform with paid add-ons, and a cloud-based management platform with a variety of deployment options for smaller teams.
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.
Untangle is very strong in the "traditional" sense of security. That means an edge appliance that either works with an existing router or is the router itself (recommended). This approach has also been adapted well to cloud environments in order to protect virtual servers and VDI workstations. As mentioned earlier, many schools are using cloud-based filtering for their 1:1 solutions for their students. This is an area where Untangle is unable to serve. Some have used an instance of Untangle in the cloud with VPN to serve their remote needs, but it is not the same as solutions that are designed for cloud-based filtering of devices without VPN.
Web Filtering is strong, and can also do application fingerprinting to allow Facebook, but not Facebook games. Secondly, a separate partition called a "rack" can be set up to give one subnet or group of users different web filtering policies than another. For example, teachers would get more freedom to browse the web than students at a school.
Built-in SD-WAN connectivity as part of your license. IPSEC tunnel creation is also amazingly easy.
Will install on any x86 hardware created in the last 5-10 years. Ram and processor requirements per user are very low.
Reporting is phenomenal, however you can get death by details very easily.
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.
The full suite can be expensive for business but will be powerful enough.
The full suite for home or small office isn't that bad of a price but may be out of reach for most home users but remember the basics are FREE so anyone can get started with it.
I would like to see it promoted for mid to large businesses as I think it can handle it.
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
NG Firewall was much more friendly in terms of layout and ease of use, the apps section is familiar to anyone and the config while in a sort of odd order is very clearly laid out. I also appreciate Untangle's endless educational videos and the support can't be beat. Overall it was more of a complete package
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.
The positive is the savings in time the IT department has recouped by not having to continuously clean and maintain end point computers. Not to mention helping end user use their time more wisely by not wasting time on non-work related web activities.
The only negative is complaints from end users about the restrictions.
