Okta vs. Sophos Cloud Web Gateway (discontinued)

Should be well-suited for a SaaS business organisation as they have a lot of internal applications and need a role-based authentication system between the various teams, improving security and audit log system to account for any breaches. It integrates well with internal applications such as Salesforce and Oracle. Best when need of SSO.

Incentivized

Sophos Secure Web Gateway is great for almost any business that needs an easily-manageable proxy server. We're a medium-sized enterprise, but the product would work great for much larger companies as well. The only real limitations would be hardware resources, but it isn't that intensive. The administration of it is very intuitive, and it was quick to set up. Where it might not make sense is across multiple sites, unless all internet traffic is funneled through one place. It would be a bit complicated to maintain multiple setups.

Incentivized

• Centralized control of enterprise passwords
• Extensive customization of acceptable password criteria
• One system for Identity and Access Management to learn
• Scalable throughout the university for all central services
• Uniform login experience for students, faculty, and staff
• Single point of response to address termination of access
• Ability to use FastPass for lower priority systems
• Excellent support of multi-factor requirements

Incentivized

• When IT Admins need to deploy virtually.
• When IT Admins want to have high availability without an extra cost (via the Virtual Appliance Deployment).
• When IT Admins want to control and give the internet fair use within the organization.

Incentivized

• I do have to reset my password quite frequently. However, I don't think there is really a way to improve this, as it's a good security measure.
• It makes me re-sign in a couple of times a day, sometimes if I haven't used my laptop for a couple of hours, and sometimes just randomly throughout the day.
• It doesn't remember my devices, either my laptop or phone. so it always calls that out.

Incentivized

• Administrator Permissions: There's not enough granularity on the administrative side. We ran into an issue where we wanted to restrict junior admins from being able to see traffic per user. But in doing so, it also prevented them from adusting some other settings they had to have access to, like setting exceptions for sites.
• CA Database: I occasionally run into issues where the list of certificate authorities in the appliance is not up to date, and I have to manually add a CA. These aren't rare, never-heard-of authorities, either, but they are usually subsidiaries of one of the major ones.
• Feedback: Sometimes it takes some good detective skills to track down why a legitimate site isn't working. It's often because of content hosted elsewhere (images, for example), but the reports aren't always clear as to what actually gets blocked. It takes some trial and error sometimes to unblock something that should be okay for our business.

Incentivized

Okta has a passion to provide secure and scalable identity solution. Their passion has come across as advocacy in a way that has deepened my knowledge of the field of authentication. I took identity for granted before but after seeing features such as external authentication I know that Okta can enable my business to reach new heights

Some of its features are great and some are slightly complex and not easy without vendor support.

Incentivized

The Okta Identity Cloud advertises 4 9's of reliability and I would go as far to say that it may even do better than that. As a true Global organization that operates in just about every region of the world, we have yet to have an issue with The Okta Identity Cloud that has impacted our business operations.

Incentivized

From my perspective, for the things that my group uses it for, Okta is very fast. It is as least as fast as the local password database methods that it replaces on our campus enterprise services. I do not believe that it slows anything down at all. In fact, not having to think too much about the login, because they all look the same, probably speeds things up somewhat.

Incentivized

We've had a few support cases over the years and every case has been handled by the Okta support team beautifully. We received clear answers to questions we had regarding setup and even were provided simple to follow guides on how to setup their product to use with custom applications.

Incentivized

Okta is far superior in terms of integrations, user interface, automation, and connectivity. Additionally, Okta offers better support and availability, and a more robust solution across every capacity Entra competes in. Okta simply works, whereas Microsoft Entra has a large overhead that is difficult to use when configuring things.

Incentivized

Sophos Secure Web Gateway has flexible pricing and deployment options. It offers a huge range of categorization options and they also pull web categorization info from other services

Incentivized

Being a cloud native application, The Okta Identity Cloud is extremely scalable and easy to setup. By integrating into existing directories and applications via standard techniques and protocols, it is very easy to both initially setup and add additional users as required. Once all the necessary integrations are setup, it's a simple rinse and repeat process to onboard additional users (which can be automated with imports as well)

Incentivized

• Increased user productivity - not fighting with IT all the time!
• Though there could be a bit more on the 'lost/broken phone' front, the self-service eliminates time that would typically be spent waiting for IT support/admins.
• An Okta account under a certain domain allows proper access from the get-go, and under certain apps (such as our HRIS), adding members is easy.
• Improved security - deactivating Okta removes all account access across multiple platforms instantly for leavers.

Incentivized

• We have not had a single instance of malware since installing Web Gateway. We have other ways to prevent infections and attacks, of course, so this is just one tool in the box, but we had a handful before this from people visiting sites they should not have. Web Gateway has prevented those, at least.
• There was some pushback initially as users had to deal with some business sites not working (usually due to CA problems). After the initial growing pains, however, we've seen very few other problems.
• The appliance updates itself, in the middle of the night, so that reduces some overhead and planned downtime.

Incentivized