Fortinet headquartered in Sunnyvale, California offers the FortiGuard Web Filtering Service, a web content filter.
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Zscaler Internet Access
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Zscaler Internet Access is delivered as a security stack as a service from the cloud, and is designed to eliminate the cost and complexity of traditional secure web gateway approaches, and provide easily scaled protection to all offices or users, regardless of location, and minimize network and appliance infrastructure.
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.
Zscaler Internet Access is an internet tunnel that pairs with the network adapter to secure traffic between servers and workstations. It can refresh policies automatically and log intrusions but does not broadcast intrusions. Cloud-based Zscaler Internet Access is easy to deploy and scale, with no hardware or software needed. In a hybrid model, Zscaler Internet Access performs some security functions on-premises and others in the cloud, allowing organizations to keep infrastructure. There is a slight learning curve from VPN and appliance architecture to this paradigm.
Zscaler completely moved away from the traditional firewall setup to a hosted firewall solution. We don't have to worry about the hardware failing or maintaining it as part of our service plan compared to our on-premise firewall. Zscaler has a lot of data centres across the world where they are maintaining their solutions so mobile consultants will always be close to one of their data centres.
Rolling out Zscaler solutions to our end customers' computers is actually pretty easy and hassle-free. As part of onboarding of new employees we can set up the Zscaler solution and push it to our end users' machines and get them connected to the cloud solutions.
Zscaler does proper market research on the latest emerging threats and they keep their firewall patched and updated to the latest versions so the security team does not have to worry about keeping the firewall updated.
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.
Zscaler is a mandatory solution required by almost every large organization with a workforce working remotely or using cloud-based apps. Its deployment is relatively easy and it keeps on working in the background without actively bothering the user. Apart from a few weird messages which a user is unable to comprehend, Zscaler is able to provide fast and safe access to the internet and other external applications.
I cannot give a fair rating for this as I have not had to contact Zscaler support. There was one time we had to contact them because we needed to check if they were having issues on their end. Our ISP was actually the problem but support seemed very friendly.
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.
Zscaler Intenet Access proved to be superior and the difference for us was the speed of policy delivery since your policy is applied in a web console and is effective in a matter of seconds. Another point to congratulate the solution is its compatibility with different platforms (macOS, Linux, Windows, Android, and iOS).
