Fortinet headquartered in Sunnyvale, California offers the FortiGuard Web Filtering Service, a web content filter.
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Symantec Intelligence Services
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Symantec WebFilter / Intelligence Services (formerly Blue Coat WebFilter) is a web application protection and web content filtering solution, designed to allow users to control access to web content and block web threats with advanced threat defense and real-time global threat intelligence.
FortiGuard Web Filtering Service is well-suited for an organisation that is able to funnel all its Internet connectivity through one device, i.e., the office environment - or perhaps where WFH workers are using a remote desktop or VPN. It allows management/IT to minimise risk by blocking websites that may be harmful, as well as websites that may enable data leakage, or even are websites that people ought not to be visiting in the workplace.
In a large environment, this is the perfect system. If you do not have constant changes, it easily becomes a system you drop in place and rarely have to think about. Our units have been rock solid and have never experienced any unexpected downtime, and upgrades are just a couple button clicks to deploy, or roll back. For small offices, with minimal traffic this may be using a sledgehammer to put in a push pin. It will work great, but the devices is likely over engineered for small offices (<50 people). That being said, price-wise it's still a great solution when compared to competing products and being from Symantec, you know it's going to be around and support for the long term.
Some websites are classified as Meaningless content, especially links used in emails to unsubscribe from lists. Luckily FortiGuard Web Filtering Service is responsive about reclassifying those quickly.
I really like the system, it's easy to use and mostly intuitive. I would have gone 10/10, but the management interface uses Java, and that seems to always make things a bit harder to start. Once everything is loaded and running, it's great - but it does require me to maintain a compatible version of Java on the machine I use to access the system, I'd be much happier with some kind of HTML5 interface. I also deducted 1 point for the functionality of the refer filter - it works as expected, but if the site isn't coded with the correct refer header, like Microsoft's site - then some page elements get stripped and pages only render about 98% correctly. I know that's not in Symantec's list of responsibilities, but having a filter that doesn't fully understand CDNs is worth the 1 point ding.
I've had exactly 1 problem in 8 years, I contacted support via the customer portal, less than an hour later I found myself in a screen share with a support tech who not only fixed my configuration error, but also took the time to ask about my usage and offered some great tips on changes. It was just one support incident, but I was impressed by the speed of response to a non-critical issue as well as the depth of product knowledge the support engineer had.
We selected FortiGuard Web Filtering because it came in the service bundle with our FortiGate unit. After testing the service for a couple of months, we disabled the web filtering that was running on our client machines and have not looked back. It's been easy to manage, effective, and fast. There isn't much more you can ask for from a filtering solution.
Symantec WebFilter / Intelligence Services solution was a simple 1U appliance that does everything we need, compared to the Forcepoint solution which required a virtual appliance, a database server, a log server, and a management server - the licensing costs alone make the Symantec WebFilter / Intelligence Services solution a clear winner. The Forcepoint solution is really good, it just requires such a big footprint without delivering much beyond what the Symantec WebFilter / Intelligence Services solution does with a single unit.
Boosts business productivity with having secured systems
Globally available threat protection adhering to our own security policies
User may sometime find it difficult to deal with - so there can be a feature to make it more user friendly in terms of user experience. That is a bit of negative we have seen.
