Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Sophos Secure Web Gateway is great for almost any business that needs an easily-manageable proxy server. We're a medium-sized enterprise, but the product would work great for much larger companies as well. The only real limitations would be hardware resources, but it isn't that intensive. The administration of it is very intuitive, and it was quick to set up. Where it might not make sense is across multiple sites, unless all internet traffic is funneled through one place. It would be a bit complicated to maintain multiple setups.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review When IT Admins need to deploy virtually. When IT Admins want to have high availability without an extra cost (via the Virtual Appliance Deployment). When IT Admins want to control and give the internet fair use within the organization. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Administrator Permissions: There's not enough granularity on the administrative side. We ran into an issue where we wanted to restrict junior admins from being able to see traffic per user. But in doing so, it also prevented them from adusting some other settings they had to have access to, like setting exceptions for sites. CA Database: I occasionally run into issues where the list of certificate authorities in the appliance is not up to date, and I have to manually add a CA. These aren't rare, never-heard-of authorities, either, but they are usually subsidiaries of one of the major ones. Feedback: Sometimes it takes some good detective skills to track down why a legitimate site isn't working. It's often because of content hosted elsewhere (images, for example), but the reports aren't always clear as to what actually gets blocked. It takes some trial and error sometimes to unblock something that should be okay for our business. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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
Read full review Sophos Secure Web Gateway has flexible pricing and deployment options. It offers a huge range of categorization options and they also pull web categorization info from other services
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review We have not had a single instance of malware since installing Web Gateway. We have other ways to prevent infections and attacks, of course, so this is just one tool in the box, but we had a handful before this from people visiting sites they should not have. Web Gateway has prevented those, at least. There was some pushback initially as users had to deal with some business sites not working (usually due to CA problems). After the initial growing pains, however, we've seen very few other problems. The appliance updates itself, in the middle of the night, so that reduces some overhead and planned downtime. Read full review ScreenShots