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Cisco Secure Web Appliance

Score8 out of 10

28 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Cisco Secure Web Appliance?

Cisco Secure Web Appliance (formerly Cisco Web Security Appliance [WSA]), powered by Cisco Talos, protects by automatically blocking risky sites and testing unknown sites before allowing users to link to them, helping with compliance. It is available models S690, S390, and S190.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Cisco Secure Web Appliance.
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Web security always with the Cisco Secure Web Appliance

Incentivized
Finn JamesView profile
Sales Manager in Sales at Group Management Services, Inc. (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cisco Secure Web Appliance in our company, especially the digital security department, at various levels of the company, to maintain high security in all our work systems, in emails and web browsing, both important aspects to maintain our workflow protected and safe. We maintain a constant sending of emails and generally receive a lot from both clients and business partners, with the Cisco Secure Web Appliance we find the possibility of keeping under control those malicious emails, those that are in the blacklist, spam or that contain a virus that may affect the devices, with Cisco Secure Web Appliance early detection we have prevented these inconveniences. In the same way, it has facilitated the transit through web browsing, where we obtain more peace of mind to do our research or work online, since the Internet is full of so many malware and malicious agents, Cisco Secure Web Appliance has been the indicated tool to strengthen our system and not allow the passage of any virus that may affect us or harm our corporate system.

Pros

  • Bulk email management, check one by one trying to make detailed evaluations without compromising important emails. In addition, its spam function is quite fluid and solid.
  • It is a great website manager, it has an intelligent detection system, extensive to discover malicious websites, just as it happens with emails, without compromising the web search or the fluidity of the work, on the contrary, it seeks to protect and avoid those sites that are not important and that contain viruses that harm the security of the devices.
  • Real-time protection, with tools that have high capabilities and an intelligent system, most of the time it is quite accurate in detections and has completely adapted to our work.

Cons

  • I think that the interface could need updates to adapt it to a much more current system, achieve quick access to necessary tools and adapt the platform to a much more customizable and comfortable system to work with.
  • It is undoubtedly a platform that is worth having, however, the license costs could be better adjusted to small businesses so that it can be accessed more easily.
  • It could be a bit complex to use, the use of codes is quite extensive, it could be adjusted to something much more practical but just as efficient.

Return on Investment

  • Having a much safer work system has given us the guarantee and security of always staying out of danger.
  • The prevention system is important for us and always keeping our devices, web and emails free of any malicious agent has allowed us an excellent workflow, without distractions or inconvenience in the development of projects.
  • Thanks to the fact that we have kept our work system safe, we have saved ourselves a lot of inconvenience, time spent, avoiding equipment damage, payments to solve problems, among many other problems that thanks to Cisco Secure Web Appliance we have been able to solve.

Alternatives Considered

McAfee Web Gateway

Other Software Used

Wrike, Allseated, Zoho Calendar

Cisco Web Security Appliance (WSA) or IronPort, your one-stop email solution

Incentivized
Kuntal DasView profile
Security Analyst Graduate Intern in Information Technology at University of Colorado Denver (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • It does a great job of filtering emails based on IP reputation. This feature works particularly very well. Cisco has a vast database of IP reputation scores and therefore offers very few false positives and negatives.
  • It checks each email thoroughly without any compromise of privacy. Any malicious link present in the body of the email makes its way to the quarantine. The IP reputation scores also help in this case.

Cons

  • The default metrics on the dashboard visualization are not that useful. It is not much customizable too. Some of the dashboard features like load, volume, etc. can have a hide option.
  • The false negatives are more than false positives. A lot of the times, it verdicts the same email as malicious and non-malicious. This can be reduced.

Return on Investment

  • The machine infection rate by downloading malicious attachments went down by 60%.
  • Phishing went down by 25%. This directly reduced user account compromise by 30%.

Alternatives Considered

Mimecast Secure Email Gateway

Other Software Used

Mimecast Secure Email Gateway, Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) for Endpoints, Cisco Umbrella, Cisco Threat Grid, Wolfram Mathematica

The most valuable product for web security

Incentivized
Eduardo Viero
IT Infrastructure Specialist in Information Technology at RANDON S.A (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Content classification is one of the key features of the Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliance. Because they use the former Senderbase, now integrated to the Talos Intelligence, they can be very efficient classifying the websites on the exact content group they belong. With that, we can effectively configure and feel safe that the users will have access to the content they must have access.
  • The robustness of the Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliance is another key point of the solutions. Both the hardware and the software are very well integrated and provide peace of mind of the administrations, because it's very stable. Also, the appliance is very well tuned; we are be able to keep the same hardware for 3 years without any performance problems.
  • As I described before, we've been using Cisco IronPort Web Security appliances for the last 9 years and since we started, the product kept evolving year after year and continues to add new features to this day. To give an example, the recent versions added the possibility of updating the exception list automatically, using API, etc. Also, the product continues to add features to protect from malware and other virtual plagues, inspecting URLs for malicious content. The value of this kind of solution, if you put it on the scale of a big corporation, is invaluable.

Cons

  • One area that the product could be improved is the reporting features. Although we can query a lot of information, sometimes we miss a tool that could provide more executive insights, or even a tool that could report Internet usage considering productivity aspects. That's something our HR department is always asking for.
  • As IT administrators, we recognize the value of the product and what we get with it, but sometime it's hard to justify the cost of the license. I'm not sure if it's the way we sell it or if it's expensive, but that's something that always bothers us when we talk about these kinds of products.

Return on Investment

  • Considering we've being using it for the last 9 years, if we just consider how many times we avoided to be contamitated by malwares coming from the Internet, just for that reason, we paid the solution 3 times.
  • Productivity improvement is something hard to prove, but we're a 100% sure we avoided some many hours of 'not interesting subjects' nativagation on the Internet, specialy in the early days, where people didn't have smartphones and used to browse the Internet for personal reasons on the corporate network.
  • Also, a little hard to prove, but we can trust that we saved a lot of bandwidth and, consequently, Internet circuit investments because of the cache mechanism.

Usability

Other Software Used

Cisco IOS Security, Cisco Firepower NGIPS (formerly Sourcefire 3D), Palo Alto Networks URL Filtering PAN-DB

It works well blocking, not easy for users to get needed sites "unblocked"

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional in Corporate (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Easy to use.
  • Can ask for "blocked" sites to be unblocked.

Cons

  • Doesn't give links or method to contact administrator to ask to have a site "unblocked".

Most Important Features

  • Blocking unwanted sites for security.
  • Blocking unwanted sites for productivity

Return on Investment

  • I have had issues getting to government sites to file online reports - which is a negative impact.

Other Software Used

Cisco Webex Meetings, Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), Gensuite

Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliances a must

Incentivized
Alan Matson, CCNA:S, MCPView profile
Senior Network Security Engineer in Information Technology at Insight (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Malware Protection
  • Reducing business confidential leaks
  • Blocking non business related websites

Cons

  • From time to time there are a lot of bugs
  • Using AD authentication can at time be a challenge especially with Mac OS X computers
  • Better reporting functions would help, we currently have to offload to a SIEM to provide this function.

Return on Investment

  • Business productivity increased after deployment
  • Security Posture increased
  • Malware infections decreased over 60% after the first 90 days.

Alternatives Considered

Websense, Forcepoint and Blue Coat Advanced Threat Protection

Other Software Used

F5 BIG-IP, FireEye, Ixia Bypass Switches