Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Chat or email support is not available. Only option is to either call them or raise a ticket by logging into their website. Pricing is not transparent and quote based. Access to websites is a little too slow with Zscaler monitoring on. Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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
Read full review 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).
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review ROI is there and it is safeguarding the data and user access to net. Being a cloud based can be scaled up when required. Third parties can be allowed based on the company IT policies (Clients or Vendors etc.) for business perspective. Read full review ScreenShots