Sophos Cloud Web Gateway has been discontinued since 30 June 2020.
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Symantec Web Security Service
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Symantec Web Security Service (WSS) is a line of defense against modern day cyber threats. It provides secure web services, enables enterprises to control access, protects users from threats, and secures their sensitive data.
Sophos Secure Web Gateway is great for almost any business that needs an easily-manageable proxy server. We're a medium-sized enterprise, but the product would work great for much larger companies as well. The only real limitations would be hardware resources, but it isn't that intensive. The administration of it is very intuitive, and it was quick to set up. Where it might not make sense is across multiple sites, unless all internet traffic is funneled through one place. It would be a bit complicated to maintain multiple setups.
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.
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.
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
Sophos Secure Web Gateway has flexible pricing and deployment options. It offers a huge range of categorization options and they also pull web categorization info from other services
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.
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.
