Palo Alto Networks Prisma Access vs. Sophos Cloud Web Gateway (discontinued)

Depending on the complexity of your equipment, devices, the network you are with, the size of your company, or the budget you are willing to pay, you should consider buying Prisma. I have in mind that it is a tool to make the leap to extra security for your devices; it is a complex tool that cannot be learned in a single day. Without a doubt, I would recommend her to a company that has a proven track record and knows what it wants.

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

• Complete control and configuration of iOS devices across our network.
• Great username options in the latest version to help keep our devices organized and easy to manage.
• Easy to enroll devices to connect to the VPN.

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

• It lags a bit on new features
• It is best used with an entire Palo Alto environment

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

The management of connections is much more seamless with the Palo tool. AnyConnect was always a nightmare to get in and manage individual connections to what can and cannot be accessed based on IP addresses. We ended going with the newer methodology of remote access so that our users would be authenticated prior to entering login credentials.

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

• It allowed us to pass very strict audits from the world's largest banks.
• It was easy for our IT department to implement.

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