The Forcepoint ONE Secure Web Gateway (SWG) is one of the three foundational gateways of the Forcepoint ONE all-in-one cloud platform. Forcepoint ONE SWG monitors and controlsany interaction with any website, including blocking access to websites based on category and risk score, blocking download of malware, blocking upload of sensitive data to personal filesharing accounts, detecting shadow IT, and optionally providingRemote Browser Isolation (RBI) with Content Disarm andReconstruction (CDR).
N/A
Sophos Web Content Filtering
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
UK headquartered Sophos offers web content filtering.
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.
Before Sophos, I would receive scammers regarding tradeshow lists. People wanted me to pay for lists, but these people weren't actually from the tradeshows. I can now block those, and have received much fewer of those scams. I am also able to open emails within quarantine to view them before deleting, releasing, allowing, or blocking. I use this to my advantage, and am able to make better decisions on what to do with the emails.
Sophos does an excellent job of category-based content filtering. It's easy to configure and flexible for many environments with the ability to tighten or loosen restrictions as requirements determing.
Sophos' built-in capabilites can force safe search rules to protect against content work-arounds like Image search and search engines in general.
The Sophos XTreme architecture also helps improve the overall performance of the Web Content Filtering solution. It is very quick and very transparent when in use on the network.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Sophos has been a much easier product to configure and eventually manage, with preset rules and policies to start off right out of the box, saving administrators time from adding every category and or site. However you can add/import all know good company sites (internal url's) as well as local sites for a safer settings. (know sites)
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.
