Sophos Cloud Web Gateway (discontinued) vs. Trend Micro Smart Protection Suite, with XGen

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

The best [way] for Trend Micro [Smart Protection Suite, with XGen] to stand out, would be to install it throughout the network, both computers and servers[.] I recommend this solution for both small companies and very large companies since currently the security of our data is very critical and many times the costs that they lead to when suffering from an attack are too high. [A] system like this is worth investing in.

• 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

• Real time threat intelligence using updates from global threat intelligence network.
• Advanced built-in threat detection and response capabilities.
• Ability to detect advanced malware, behavior and communications.
• Flexibility to deploy with on-premise or cloud or hybrid.
• Single management console to manage all layers of security.

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

• Documentation is something that can be improved here.
• Licensing is overly complex and needs to be improved for different features/variations.
• Install is difficult.

Incentivized

I have only had to contact technical support once, which in itself shows what a good product this is, and I received spot-on advice from the person I contacted.

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

Everything I've used and installed before and since has been easier to implement and support. TM had attractive pricing, however, that was negated by the overall experience.

• 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

• We have stopped multiple infections of ransomware from spreading.
• Lost some productivity when database crashed
• Updates tend to slow system down

Incentivized