Sophos Cloud Web Gateway has been discontinued since 30 June 2020.
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Symantec Edge Secure Gateway
Score 4.0 out of 10
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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.
Sophos Secure Web Gateway works perfectly for any SMB/Enterprise environment where the IT Admin wants to control the internet. With that said, I can not think of an organization that doesn't need to control or audit the usage of their internet.
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.
Administrator Permissions: There's not enough granularity on the administrative side. We ran into an issue where we wanted to restrict junior admins from being able to see traffic per user. But in doing so, it also prevented them from adusting some other settings they had to have access to, like setting exceptions for sites.
CA Database: I occasionally run into issues where the list of certificate authorities in the appliance is not up to date, and I have to manually add a CA. These aren't rare, never-heard-of authorities, either, but they are usually subsidiaries of one of the major ones.
Feedback: Sometimes it takes some good detective skills to track down why a legitimate site isn't working. It's often because of content hosted elsewhere (images, for example), but the reports aren't always clear as to what actually gets blocked. It takes some trial and error sometimes to unblock something that should be okay for our business.
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.
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 had experience in the past with Barracuda and WatchGuard. Barracuda was fine, although I found it harder to configure and administrate. Less intuitive, but possibly more robust. WatchGuard was a nightmare, it either blocked too many things or not enough, and the rules were too complex. I would pick Sophos over either of these, both for ease of use, and for cost.
We have not had a single instance of malware since installing Web Gateway. We have other ways to prevent infections and attacks, of course, so this is just one tool in the box, but we had a handful before this from people visiting sites they should not have. Web Gateway has prevented those, at least.
There was some pushback initially as users had to deal with some business sites not working (usually due to CA problems). After the initial growing pains, however, we've seen very few other problems.
The appliance updates itself, in the middle of the night, so that reduces some overhead and planned downtime.
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.
