Cisco Secure Web Appliance vs. F5 Secure Web Gateway Services

Based on the platforms I have evaluated, I think the WSA is a great fit for any organization that needs a proxy server that provides control over what web sites are accessed or when they can be accessed. I think it is probably overkill if you simply need a proxy server for bandwidth savings or because you need to proxy general Internet access without extensive filtering needs.

Incentivized

You're looking for something very comprehensive. F5 gets you covered and a very standard approach. A nice, a very simple workload. That would be if you are in the bleeding edge of delivering something very new, there will probably have problems using F5. I wouldn't become an F5 there For the main cases, F5 is a good solution.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• it keeps my web sites secure
• it has a great future roadmap
• it looks good in the rack

Incentivized

• The categories provided are not as granular as some competitors, like Websense.
• Cisco does not have as many resources devoted to categorizing websites as some competitors, like Websense.
• New features require administrators to pay attention to updates. New features are disabled by default.

Incentivized

• it can allow for more note space on configs

Incentivized

Because it's one of those products you almost don't realize it exists from the end user. From the administrator perspective, you can do everything on its web interface and it's very intuitive to manage, once you know the concepts behind identities, acls, etc. Also, once you build the control structure, I mean, you link 'local' groups with your own Active Directory groups, as we did here, you don't need to be managing those things on the appliance itself.

Incentivized

Because I'm a cybersecurity expert. I'm always lacking the cybersecurity part, but it's more of my ADM than others. If it wasn't for that, I would probably rate in a 10.

Incentivized

Our experience with Cisco's support was terrible. Other than the fact that they don't respond to service-related emails with urgency, they also keep on changing the policies that affected us. Recently, they came up with a new look for the same software, which was insanely slow. Renewal of keys for the old interface took months. Overall, the support was not very friendly from the users' point of view.

Incentivized

Considering we're with Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliances for the last 9 years, as I stated, we don't have too much experience with other producs. What I can say is that in the past, we evaluated Websense before it became Forcepoint and we also used MS ISA Server for webfilter. As you may imagine, IronPort is a very very superior product.

Incentivized

managing other products (NS) are a pain in the neck and make me want to pull my hair out. Im sure there are things that the F5 can improve on and their road map and ideas are at the cutting edge. I cant wait to see how their plans work out and make the product better in the future.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• power consumption
• the device is heavy

Incentivized