Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway vs. NordLayer vs. Okta

Over the years, [in our experience], the maintenance of the Forcepoint Web Security solution proved to be more cumbersome and troublesome with each version upgrade. In addition, it did not transition well to support the large increase of remote workers. We also experienced weird incompatibilities with the client. We have since replaced this solution with Zscaler Internet Access, a cloud-based secure web gateway solution with a client that behaves as expected, is more flexible, and requires significantly less administration.

Incentivized

NordLayer has become an invaluable resource for our security posture and day-to-day activity. The primary use case is preventing staff members from accessing sensitive resources on an unencrypted connection, applying NordLayer and conditional access policies in congruency. The ability to create teams and assigned them to specific dedicated servers is also helpful and allows for further security segmentation

Incentivized

Should be well-suited for a SaaS business organisation as they have a lot of internal applications and need a role-based authentication system between the various teams, improving security and audit log system to account for any breaches. It integrates well with internal applications such as Salesforce and Oracle. Best when need of SSO.

Incentivized

• It prevents users from accessing websites that may have recently been created for the purpose of distributing malware.
• It prevents users from accidentally or intentionally accessing websites that are considered inappropriate for a work environment.
• It allows us to create different policies for different teams in our organization.

Incentivized

• Easy to use
• Simple user interface desgin
• Support many VPN protocol
• Fast and reliable connection

Incentivized

• Centralized control of enterprise passwords
• Extensive customization of acceptable password criteria
• One system for Identity and Access Management to learn
• Scalable throughout the university for all central services
• Uniform login experience for students, faculty, and staff
• Single point of response to address termination of access
• Ability to use FastPass for lower priority systems
• Excellent support of multi-factor requirements

Incentivized

• The user access logs contain a lot of useless information. I understand this is very hard to tackle as I've seen this across any product that logs web activity.
• I would like to see more customization options of website block pages.

Incentivized

• The browser plugin needs some work, or some research about what browser/OS restrictions may limit its functionality. Ours does not work at all even after contacting support so we do not use it
• Toast/Windows notifications scheduled or deployed through admin center would be amazing. The ability to remind a user who has been disconnected for X hours would be a great feature

Incentivized

• I do have to reset my password quite frequently. However, I don't think there is really a way to improve this, as it's a good security measure.
• It makes me re-sign in a couple of times a day, sometimes if I haven't used my laptop for a couple of hours, and sometimes just randomly throughout the day.
• It doesn't remember my devices, either my laptop or phone. so it always calls that out.

Incentivized

It is very stable, the organisation has "locked in" the product and has no plans to change or try another product. We have already renewed our 2019-2020 licenses. It is user friendly and people catch on easily when they first use it. The only downtime is when we install Microsoft updates! It has excellent reporting which help in determining how the organisation's Internet is used and also during both internal and external IT audits.

Incentivized

Okta has a passion to provide secure and scalable identity solution. Their passion has come across as advocacy in a way that has deepened my knowledge of the field of authentication. I took identity for granted before but after seeing features such as external authentication I know that Okta can enable my business to reach new heights

Despite the intimidating Linux CLI when you use the appliance for troubleshooting, the web security usability compensates as most of the Administration of the system is done there. It is GUI based and has an easy to use UI where one can navigate around rather easily like getting reports, checking alerts, looking the whole setup under deployment to check if all services are running in one place though there are other parts to the system.

Incentivized

Some of its features are great and some are slightly complex and not easy without vendor support.

Incentivized

The Okta Identity Cloud advertises 4 9's of reliability and I would go as far to say that it may even do better than that. As a true Global organization that operates in just about every region of the world, we have yet to have an issue with The Okta Identity Cloud that has impacted our business operations.

Incentivized

From my perspective, for the things that my group uses it for, Okta is very fast. It is as least as fast as the local password database methods that it replaces on our campus enterprise services. I do not believe that it slows anything down at all. In fact, not having to think too much about the login, because they all look the same, probably speeds things up somewhat.

Incentivized

The is a quick first response to acknowledge your issue and the Engineers never take more than two hours to fix an issue and we hardly get issues looking at the fact that the system is pretty stable. There is also a robust Knowledge Base in the site for known problems.

Incentivized

We've had a few support cases over the years and every case has been handled by the Okta support team beautifully. We received clear answers to questions we had regarding setup and even were provided simple to follow guides on how to setup their product to use with custom applications.

Incentivized

Research known issues with upgrading from the Support Knowledge base, this will enable you avoid road blocks along the way and reduce your dependence on Forcepoint Support

Incentivized

To be honest, once using Forcepoint for our Web Security, I have not wanted to look anywhere else. The dashboard gives me quick insight of threats, productivity, and bandwidth usage. Again, this is a layer in my security and it fills many holes. I feel safe and I do like I can just let it do its thing

Incentivized

easy configuration and use case

Okta is far superior in terms of integrations, user interface, automation, and connectivity. Additionally, Okta offers better support and availability, and a more robust solution across every capacity Entra competes in. Okta simply works, whereas Microsoft Entra has a large overhead that is difficult to use when configuring things.

Incentivized

Being a cloud native application, The Okta Identity Cloud is extremely scalable and easy to setup. By integrating into existing directories and applications via standard techniques and protocols, it is very easy to both initially setup and add additional users as required. Once all the necessary integrations are setup, it's a simple rinse and repeat process to onboard additional users (which can be automated with imports as well)

Incentivized

• Being a non-profit the cost is a bit higher than some competitors so our ROI takes a bit longer to recoup. I would really like to see better non-profit pricing.
• The ease of doing a report on someone cuts down on the IT man-hours to do website tracking for managers as we can do it from a central point whereas in the past (prior to Forcepoint/Websense) we would have to ghost their machine to look for activity as well as their local servers.

Incentivized

• Improved sercurity
• Incresed productivity
• Performance impact

Incentivized

• Increased user productivity - not fighting with IT all the time!
• Though there could be a bit more on the 'lost/broken phone' front, the self-service eliminates time that would typically be spent waiting for IT support/admins.
• An Okta account under a certain domain allows proper access from the get-go, and under certain apps (such as our HRIS), adding members is easy.
• Improved security - deactivating Okta removes all account access across multiple platforms instantly for leavers.

Incentivized