Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention vs. pfSense

-Where companies need to secure their attachment, which goes outside, means from their company to outside -Where companies need to ensure their client's personal information -Where companies need DLP. They need to look for Forcepoint only, as they have the upper hand over the rest of their competitors.

Incentivized

I believe PFSense is well suited for both home lab environments as well as up to small to mid-size business environments on a tight budget. However, I would implore that anything in production requires the use of the authorized hardware that PFSense sells to receive support. However, in my experience, PFSense is a solid set-and-forget firewall solution.

• It has predominantly protected us from unauthorized parties and has provided us with better visibility and control over our data.
• This software has also successfully prevented us from both malicious and accidental tasks, which are quite flexible actions when it comes to the violation of data loss prevention policies.
• This product has been successful in improving compliance and even mitigating compliance violations, which further facilitated IT security.
• I think there is room for improvement, as the user interface is slightly rough and difficult to adopt in the beginning. The software also hangs up at a few instances, which leads to some wasting of time and annoyance, but other than that, this software is good. The technical staff should work on the complexities for a better user experience.

Incentivized

• Easy to use. Good user interface design! Easy to understand and easy to set up.
• Lower hardware requirement. 3 years ago, we used an old PC to run it. Now, we have changed to a router device with Celeron CPU and 8GB RAM. It runs smoothly with a 1000G commercial broadband.

Incentivized

• Forcepoint technical support--specially for users who go with essential support--is challenging to get support on time. You need the ticket to be raised long beforehand to get support from TAC. However, in the case of enterprise support, its is not like this technical person will come on a priority basis.
• However it comes with higher prices, especially for SMB, it is allowed to pay that amount for support only.

Incentivized

• I did kind of mention a Con in the Pro section with OpenVPN.
• When I create a config for an employee other employees are able to login to that config.
• I could be doing something wrong when I am making it - I am not afraid to admit that as I am pretty new to all of this, but it seems like it builds a key and I would think the key would be unique in some way to each employee, but I could be wrong.
• I actually do not have a lot of Con's for this software - I did not get to set this up on our work network so I am not sure of any downfalls when installing.
• I installed this on my personal machine in a Hyper-V environment to get a feel for it before I started working on it at work and it seemed pretty smooth. I didn't run into any issues.

Incentivized

We have been fairly happy with the product and how it has worked. We have looked at other vendors for url filter and such and have not found one that meets our needs or does what we have been doing with Websense. The product has been fairly stable and we have only had a few issues in the past. We have all seen that it was one of the highest leaders from the Gartner Group Magic Quadrant for Web Gateways.

Incentivized

For us, Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention was difficult to administer, did not work well when it did work, was incredibly expensive for the feature set you get, and was difficult to uninstall when we moved on from the software. Once it was fully set up, it worked occasionally for us.

Incentivized

The pfSense UI is easy to navigate and pretty go look at. It is much better than some high dollar firewalls that just throw menus you you. The pfSense UI is quick and responsive and makes sense 99% of the time. Changes are committed quickly and the hardware rarely requires a reboot. It just runs.

Incentivized

Support from Forcepoint has been lacking. When calling in with a high priority issue we rarely are able to work with a technician immediately. The queue waits are very long and when you get through there are no support engineers available and we need to wait for a call back for hours it seems.

Incentivized

pfSense+ basic provides "As Available" email support. pfSense+ Pro offers 24 hr turn around email support. pfSense+ Enterprise offers 24/7 phone support.

Incentivized

User friendly solution that makes it easy to deploy and manage. Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention very effective to protecting our valuable data on endpoints and where data lives like in the Cloud, server and on-premises disk drives and its valuable to just set policies once and start utilizing Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention solution.

Incentivized

Meraki has a unified management login for all devices, which is nice. It also has decent content filtering, both areas where pfSense is weaker. Where pfSense far ouclasses Meraki is in the ease of use and the other width of features. These include features such as better VPN interoperability, non-subscription based pricing, auditability, not relying on the infrastructure of a third party, more transparency of what's actually going on, easier to deploy replacements if hardware fails. Additionally, the NAT management for pfSense seems to be a bit better, as you can NAT between any network segment and not just the LAN segments out the WAN interfaces.

• The exchange of financial documents with customers creates extreme risk as data loss could result in financial and reputation damage to the customer. The cost of deploying Forcepoint is fractions of pennies compared to the potential financial impact of data loss.
• There is some administrative overhead associated as false positives are inevitable, requiring a manual review and a potential loss of productivity.

Incentivized

• pfSense can be installed on commodity hardware with no licensing fees. With a simple less than 10 minute restore time, on most hardware, it's an extremely inexpensive way to achieve the same results that some of the more expensive vendors provide.
• The easy to use interface has allowed configuration management to be preformed by lower level technicians with quick and easy training.

Incentivized