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 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.
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 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. 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 It only allows UTF-8 encoded characters. It does not support metadata. It does not support comments in the custom filter file. 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 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)
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 Super positive impact, the Sandstorming Add On, it increases protection at it's maximum level (for new or existent/variant threats). Customers often have the need of a system capable of report everything that the network is being handed, Sophos Web Content Filtering achieves this. The ROI is very fast since top management quickly see results on filtering and reporting of what is really going on within their networks. Read full review ScreenShots