Symantec Secure Web Gateway (SWG) protects organizations across the web, social media, applications, and mobile networks. SWG acts as a proxy between users and the internet to identify malicious websites and payloads and to control access to sensitive content. SWG solutions consolidate a broad feature-set to authenticate users, filter web traffic, identify cloud application usage, provide data loss prevention, deliver threat prevention, and ensure visibility into encrypted traffic.
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Symantec WebFilter / Intelligence Services
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Symantec WebFilter / Intelligence Services (formerly Blue Coat WebFilter) is a web application protection and web content filtering solution, designed to allow users to control access to web content and block web threats with advanced threat defense and real-time global threat intelligence.
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.
In conjunction with Active Directory, we can allow or deny access to the internet very quickly. We can also determine the level of access to the internet.
To satisfy our executive requirements, we can provide regular reports on internet usage.
On occasion, content analysis needs some tweaking. Specifically, when huge files our downloaded.
For our organization using cloud-based applications and services is very discouraged.
However, the universe seems to be trending towards cloud-based offerings.
It may be reassuring if Symantec ProxySG and Advanced Secure Gateway (ASG) could enhance protection in dealing with cloud services, particularly in protecting data.
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.
We have submitted support request to Symantec ProxySG and Advanced Secure Gateway (ASG). In all cases, responses have been timely, and very comprehensive.
The support staff is very knowledgeable and does not hesitate to involve expert resources as required.
We have never had an unsolved case with Symantec ProxySG and Advanced Secure Gateway (ASG).
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.
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.
With the advent of the Symantec ProxySG and Advanced Secure Gateway (ASG), we have reduced by 95% the number of internal security incidents and events.
As a result, we have reduced the effort and cost of investigating security incidents.
Knock on wood, as a result, and we have never had any data or security breaches.
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.
