McAfee WebAdvisor (discontinued) vs. Symantec Intelligence Services vs. Zscaler Internet Access

McAfee Web Protection is a great tool when your work requires you to surf the internet a lot and download files. Being a Software Developer, I have to search for a lot of things and have to visit lots of websites for solutions or learning new concepts. Having McAfee's Web Protection enables me to visit only the sites that are safe and it even blocks the trackers. It also scans the files (usually software and codes) that I download and lets me know whether they are safe to open or not.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I feel the product is very good to set up basic standards and go beyond that in many aspects. However, due to being sometimes too simple, it limits the ability to do some other complex changes. Having the ability to do both would be ideal for some, if not all, of the products within Zscaler Internet Access. A simple setup to have it stand-up, and more advanced settings for those more experienced.

Incentivized

• Make Web Surfing safe and secure.
• Block Trackers.
• Notifies if a webpages are safe.
• Scans downloads.

Incentivized

• Almost real time protection from all ongoing threats with their DLA inspection
• Great visibility into web filtering policies using the dashboards and reports
• No patching or downloads needed, immediate protection is provided as clients are always cloud connected

Incentivized

• Provides a secure VPN connection point for endpoint connectivity.
• Provides the VPN connectivity in a fast and reliable connection state.
• Very dependable, once connected the connection stays up and there's no fuss.
• Very good at letting you know when you are not authenticated.
• Very easy to authenticate and regain access when your session times out.

Incentivized

• It shows a lot of popups to upgrade to AntiVirus which gets annoying sometimes.

Incentivized

• The admin interface would be better off not using Java
• Setting up SSL properly can be a bit challenging
• Could really use a better source for training, like a library of how-to videos

Incentivized

• ZS CLI support to turn off ZIA and ZDX service specifically on mac.
• Better visibility into failed posture devices, including a timeline and the reason the posture failed (This is about the Zscaler mobile portal: Enrolled devices --> Failed posture devices).

Incentivized

While Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) delivers critical value in cloud security and RBI compliance, I rate renewal likelihood 7/10 due to evolving needs versus platform limitations. Below is my rationale:

Key Gaps:

1. Advanced Threat Costs:

ZIA’s add-ons (e.g., Advanced DLP, Sandboxing) incur 35%+ cost premiums – straining budgets as transaction volumes (UPI/iMobile) grow 50% YoY.

2. API Banking Scalability:

ZIA’s API rate limits throttle real-time policy sync during UPI peaks (10K+ TPS), forcing workarounds for finacle integrations.

3. RBI Future-Proofing:

Limited native support for upcoming digital rupee (CBDC) security rules requires custom development, increasing compliance overhead.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Getting started was pretty straightforward. We can tell the product is way more robust than we are using it. It started as a replacement for previous DNS-blocking content filtering, but we're exploring how this will add value with an upcoming DLP redesign and with traffic optimization at some of our remote sites with severe bandwidth limits.

Incentivized

There are often performance issues reported

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Zscaler's ZIA support is quick and knowledgable. They respond within 1-2 hours of you submitting your ticket. They are very thorough and are typically ready to jump on a live troubleshooting session. Our ZIA platform and how we use is it unique so at times tickets can be open for weeks but we alway get quality support compared to other unrelated product support in our enterprise

Incentivized

good the engineer give excellent support and eplanation

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The overall user community and scope of supportability outweighed the others on our short list. Netskope was a close second, but the risk, though small, was greater than that of bringing Zscaler aboard. We were looking for a mature, well-supported, highly functional, and fine-grained solution that met all our user and information security requirements.

Incentivized

• I am not sure about that as I am just a user and have not been involved with the ROI aspect.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• I would say it has a very good ROI, as whenever someone can't access something, they submit a ticket to our network engineer, and within minutes, the site is safely added to ZIA with best-practice configurations. After seeing a little of the UI from the Zenith event, it seems very user-friendly to control these policies.

Incentivized