Likelihood to Recommend Before Sophos, I would receive scammers regarding tradeshow lists. People wanted me to pay for lists, but these people weren't actually from the tradeshows. I can now block those, and have received much fewer of those scams. I am also able to open emails within quarantine to view them before deleting, releasing, allowing, or blocking. I use this to my advantage, and am able to make better decisions on what to do with the emails.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Sophos does an excellent job of category-based content filtering. It's easy to configure and flexible for many environments with the ability to tighten or loosen restrictions as requirements determing. Sophos' built-in capabilites can force safe search rules to protect against content work-arounds like Image search and search engines in general. The Sophos XTreme architecture also helps improve the overall performance of the Web Content Filtering solution. It is very quick and very transparent when in use on the network. Read full review 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 Read full review Cons It only allows UTF-8 encoded characters. It does not support metadata. It does not support comments in the custom filter file. Read full review 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 Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Sophos has been a much easier product to configure and eventually manage, with preset rules and policies to start off right out of the box, saving administrators time from adding every category and or site. However you can add/import all know good company sites (internal url's) as well as local sites for a safer settings. (know sites)
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment Super positive impact, the Sandstorming Add On, it increases protection at it's maximum level (for new or existent/variant threats). Customers often have the need of a system capable of report everything that the network is being handed, Sophos Web Content Filtering achieves this. The ROI is very fast since top management quickly see results on filtering and reporting of what is really going on within their networks. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots