Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway vs. Symantec Web Security Service

Over the years, [in our experience], the maintenance of the Forcepoint Web Security solution proved to be more cumbersome and troublesome with each version upgrade. In addition, it did not transition well to support the large increase of remote workers. We also experienced weird incompatibilities with the client. We have since replaced this solution with Zscaler Internet Access, a cloud-based secure web gateway solution with a client that behaves as expected, is more flexible, and requires significantly less administration.

Incentivized

Symantec Web Security Service monitors and filters network traffic to protect web servers from cyberattacks. Its single dashboard view, excellent UI/UX, and easy DLP integration make it a market leader. Excellent sandboxing for safe browsing in restricted IT networks. Threat categorization and stateful SSL description of web traffic to identify dynamic threat vectors. However, alerts and notifications only work quickly when large-scale DDoS attacks happen.

Incentivized

• It prevents users from accessing websites that may have recently been created for the purpose of distributing malware.
• It prevents users from accidentally or intentionally accessing websites that are considered inappropriate for a work environment.
• It allows us to create different policies for different teams in our organization.

Incentivized

• Complete web protection.
• Easy to setup.
• Great reputation and credibility.

Incentivized

• The user access logs contain a lot of useless information. I understand this is very hard to tackle as I've seen this across any product that logs web activity.
• I would like to see more customization options of website block pages.

Incentivized

• Advanced and targeted attacks
• Policy granularity
• better support

Incentivized

It is very stable, the organisation has "locked in" the product and has no plans to change or try another product. We have already renewed our 2019-2020 licenses. It is user friendly and people catch on easily when they first use it. The only downtime is when we install Microsoft updates! It has excellent reporting which help in determining how the organisation's Internet is used and also during both internal and external IT audits.

Incentivized

Despite the intimidating Linux CLI when you use the appliance for troubleshooting, the web security usability compensates as most of the Administration of the system is done there. It is GUI based and has an easy to use UI where one can navigate around rather easily like getting reports, checking alerts, looking the whole setup under deployment to check if all services are running in one place though there are other parts to the system.

Incentivized

The is a quick first response to acknowledge your issue and the Engineers never take more than two hours to fix an issue and we hardly get issues looking at the fact that the system is pretty stable. There is also a robust Knowledge Base in the site for known problems.

Incentivized

The support has become average ever since broadcom acquisition and they moving to GCP. There is no focus of existing customers as the presale do not exist

Incentivized

Research known issues with upgrading from the Support Knowledge base, this will enable you avoid road blocks along the way and reduce your dependence on Forcepoint Support

Incentivized

To be honest, once using Forcepoint for our Web Security, I have not wanted to look anywhere else. The dashboard gives me quick insight of threats, productivity, and bandwidth usage. Again, this is a layer in my security and it fills many holes. I feel safe and I do like I can just let it do its thing

Incentivized

Symantec Web Security Service is a powerful tool for moderating website traffic and protecting user data. Easy DLP integration makes it a market leader, and it works with Symantec DLP and EDR to protect remote users' browsing activity. Threat categorization and stateful SSL description of web traffic to identify dynamic threat vectors. Unified threat dashboard with seamless alerting. So compared to other solutions, it is standout.

Incentivized

• Being a non-profit the cost is a bit higher than some competitors so our ROI takes a bit longer to recoup. I would really like to see better non-profit pricing.
• The ease of doing a report on someone cuts down on the IT man-hours to do website tracking for managers as we can do it from a central point whereas in the past (prior to Forcepoint/Websense) we would have to ghost their machine to look for activity as well as their local servers.

Incentivized

• Slightly on the costlier side.
• Less risk of security lapse.
• Extensive protection against web attacks.

Incentivized