Symantec SSL Visibility Appliance Reviews

Name: Symantec SSL Visibility Appliance
Brand: Broadcom
Rating: 3.8 (3 reviews)

3.8 out of 5

3 reviews
100% willing to recommend

What is Symantec SSL Visibility Appliance?

The Symantec SSL Visibility Appliance is a high-performance transparent proxy for Secure Socket Layer (SSL) network communications. You install the SSL Visibility Appliance in the network and attach one or more security devices to it. The SSL Visibility Appliance is able to decrypt the SSL traffic, enabling the attached security appliances to see the plaintext (that is, the original unencrypted data) in SSL encrypted connections. It eliminates the blind spot created by encrypted traffic, enables your organization to combat the threats hidden within SSL, while preserving user privacy and regulatory compliance. Powerful policies allow you to bypass specific types of traffic (such as financial or healthcare data) to maintain employee data privacy.

Get the SSL/TLS Decryption Buyer's Guide and find out what your peers are saying about Symantec SSL Visibility Appliance, Fidelis Elevate, A10 Networks Thunder SSLi and more!

Symantec SSL Visibility Appliance is the #1 ranked solution in top SSL/TLS Decryption solutions. PeerSpot users give Symantec SSL Visibility Appliance an average rating of 7.6 out of 10. Symantec SSL Visibility Appliance is most commonly compared to Fidelis Elevate: Symantec SSL Visibility Appliance vs Fidelis Elevate. Symantec SSL Visibility Appliance is popular among the large enterprise segment, accounting for 63% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a financial services firm, accounting for 19% of all views.

Buyer's Guide

SSL/TLS Decryption

June 2025

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Helped 861,390 peers since 2012

Featured Symantec SSL Visibility Appliance reviews

cto543714

CTO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The ability to do SSL chaining is most valuable. It provides the ability to send decrypted traffic at close-to-line speed to products that can't decrypt. So, it can take the decrypted traffic and send it to your IPS or your other tools to be able to see what's inside of that traffic for DLP or malicious content detection. That's the whole beauty of it. It was probably the elephant in the room for the longest in terms of SSL decryption. It can get the high band, especially for places that had a lot of decryption to do, such as big finance companies, big telcos, etc. It is a really good product. It has different features and things built into it. Feature-wise, they're the elephant in the room.

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Mohammad Taufeeq

Senior Network Security Engineer | Security Solutions Design Engineer at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

One of the most valuable aspects of this solution is that it's easy to deploy without a lot of complications. Of course, one has to be very good at understanding the PKI as a whole. But in terms of implementation, we are utilizing Fail-to-Network, which means even if SSLV for some reason goes down, we don't get traffic interruption. In terms of SSLV's feature itself, it is very flexible in terms of whitelisting. For example, if I do not want to encrypt some things that are subject to compliance, it has easy categorization of the hostname that is out of the box. In one click I am able to dictate which hostname it should encrypt or not. It is easy to abide by the compliance policy. It is not just category-based, it is also very easy to whitelist or bypass the decryption based on IP addresses. For example, we have a finance minister who is in our network and we do not want to see all of his internet activity. It allows us to bypass it based on his IP address. There are many ways we can bypass SSL decryption. Be it destination IP, the source IP, the URL, the hostname, et cetera. This is the easiest solution and I did a little bit of research before and I could not find another solution that does this. There is also a return on investment. They have very good hardware and it is already prepaid for SSL 1.3. They have a way to do that. Not all types of versions can be decrypted. But to some extent, they can do that also, SSL 1.3. That is something amazing and most of the other vendors cannot do that.

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Mohammad Taufeeq

Senior Network Security Engineer | Security Solutions Design Engineer at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Technical support needs to be improved. I would like to see a graphical trace or view of the issues. It has to be in the simplest language because a lot of network and security operations people do not understand SSL. For the sake of smooth operations, there should be a graphical, easy naming convention for SSL. The GUI should give us easier access to those concerns, like a packet tracer. If somebody enters the host IP or the hostname then it will tell the administrator that there is a problem with a policy, or what is causing the issue. Again, it has to be in the simplest words because not all organizations can hire PKI experts. It depends on the organization because in banking they will have a PKI team and they understand these things well, but a lot of organizations do not have the same resources. Essentially, from an operations perspective, they have to come up with nice ways for operational personnel to easily and effectively manage it.

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Symantec SSL Visibility Appliance mindshare

As of July 2025, the mindshare of Symantec SSL Visibility Appliance in the SSL/TLS Decryption category stands at 29.3%, down from 34.3% compared to the previous year, according to calculations based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

SSL/TLS Decryption

Key learnings from peers

Valuable Features

"The ability to do SSL chaining is most valuable. It provides the ability to send decrypted traffic at close-to-line speed to products that can't decrypt. So, it can take the decrypted traffic and send it to your IPS or your other tools to be able to see what's inside of that traffic for DLP or malicious content detection. That's the whole beauty of it. It was probably the elephant in the room for the longest in terms of SSL decryption. It can get the high band, especially for places that had a lot of decryption to do, such as big finance companies, big telcos, etc."
"One of the most valuable aspects of this solution is that it's easy to deploy without a lot of complications."
"The most valuable feature is the Fail-to-Network (FTN) option, which means that if for any reason the appliance goes down then there is no interruption in traffic."

Room for Improvement

"They're working on being able to handle more traffic. They're working on bigger boxes full of throughput because now networks are going to 40 gigs and 100 gigs. So, trying to keep up with the bandwidth demands is where things are being pushed."
"From the operations perspective, they have to come up with easier ways so that the operational guys can easily manage it."
"Technical support needs to be improved."