Cisco Web Security Appliance pros and cons

The reporting needs improvement.

WSA is lacking firewall features.

I would like more automation.

We would like to see a security service head, where we can combine all the security into one solution.

The solution could improve the graphical user interface. It is not up to the regular standard of what we would expect from Cisco. Additionally, they need to improve the categorization when blocking in the settings. The CLI could have a better view than the graphical user interface but I did not investigate further.

The transparent proxy is quite difficult to enforce on smartphones and tablets.

It should have a user-based quota, per-user quota, that can be defined on the appliance.

As Cisco Web Security Appliance is eight years old, though it's simple to access its UI, the UI needs a little bit of updating. If it could be more interactive similar to the latest gen solutions, that would improve the product. Adding a few more integrations would also make Cisco Web Security Appliance better.

Customer support is good but could be improved.

Setting up Cisco Web Security Appliance is highly complex and it takes about a week. We have to connect it to the Active Directory and configure all the policies for end users. It takes a long time to configure rules for our company data like port forwarding and separating the public and local components.