Cisco Web Security Appliance Reviews

I use Cisco Web Security Appliance in my company for proxy-related purposes.

The most valuable features of the solution are the functions of proxy for the users who use the internet and the security it offers against the not-so-secure web pages.

There are certain shortcomings related to the product's management capabilities, where improvements are required. The solution needs to provide better management of the category of web pages.

I have three years of experience with Cisco Web Security Appliance. My company is a customer of the solution. I use the solution's previous or the previous to previous version.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Around 300 people in my company use the solution.

I use the solution every day in my company.

At times, the product's technical support takes a long time to provide solutions.

I rate the technical support a six out of ten.

Neutral

I have experience with GFI KerioControl. I also have experience with other devices from Cisco. I have done some integration of the Cisco Web Security Appliance with other systems.

I rate the product's initial setup phase a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is a difficult setup phase, and ten is an easy setup phase.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

It took quite a long time to implement the solution, maybe seven to eight months. The deployment phase took a few weeks.

Two or three specialists who are network administrators in my company were involved in the deployment and maintenance phases of the product.

The product's reseller helped my company with the product's implementation phase.

From an ROI perspective, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

I rate the product price a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price.

During the evaluation phase, my company considered GFI KerioControl and Fortinet FortiProxy against Cisco Web Security Appliance.

I rate the overall product a seven out of ten.

Cisco Web Security Appliance is user-friendly and easy to manage. It protects your environment while accessing the internet. 

The tool needs to improve cloud-based decryption. 

Cisco Web Security Appliance's stability is good. 

The product is scalable. We have 1500 to 2000 users. 

The tool's deployment is very straightforward. The only process that can take time is aligning the policies as per your use case. 

Getting a partner from Cisco to help with the deployment is good. 

You can get a good ROI in the long run. 

The tool's licensing is yearly. 

I rate the product a ten out of ten. 

Cisco Web Security Appliance can be used as a proxy for sending all traffic to the internet. In that case, I can apply security policies and provide anti-malware, protection, and attack prevention with this security appliance. Additionally, there is some advanced functionality, such as security orchestration and security incident management appliance integration. You are able to have full protection and incident management.

This solution can be deployed in the cloud or on-premise.

I am using a virtual infrastructure which is the easiest infrastructure.

The most valuable feature of Cisco Web Security Appliance is the provided anti-malware functionality and URL categorization. I can block access to malicious websites. 99 percent of the cases are related to a malicious website. If I cannot browse those malicious websites, then we are 99 percent protected. 

We have SSL decryption and we receive full visibility of what is happening on the network. With SSL decryption, most of the traffic is encrypted and if I had the traffic recorded, I could see what is happening inside that traffic.

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.

I have been using Cisco Web Security Appliance for approximately seven years.

The solution is stable and has high availability.

I rate the stability of Cisco Web Security Appliance a nine out of ten.

The scalability of Cisco Web Security Appliance is high.

I rate the scalability of Cisco Web Security Appliance a ten out of ten.

Cisco is the best support team available on this planet. I am happy with the support I have received.

I have worked with Cisco Firepower and the Cisco DNA Center Platform. It is a stable solution, but they are working on improving it.

The initial setup is complex. The is not much flexibility when creating policies. As per the design guide, they have provided a lot of limitations for creating policies. For example, if I create 30 access policies, 30 customization decryption policies, and 30 custom complex policies, there is a complexity in the qualification. If the policy is complex then CP gets high, which is a problem. 

Following the best practice guide, I have to follow that constraint. However, customers, are not happy with the restriction and policies. They want to create as much policy as possible. 

The implementation took approximately two weeks or ten working days.

I do the implementation of this solution.

There is a subscription-based license needed to use this solution.

I rate Cisco Web Security Appliance a nine out of ten.

We use Cisco Web Security Appliance for proxy purposes, for enterprises.

The best feature of Cisco Web Security Appliance is its policy framing. It also has a good UI and it can handle traffic well. Cisco Web Security Appliance is a good product.

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.

Cisco Web Security Appliance is a web appliance, so I don't see much scope for adding other features to it.

I've been using Cisco Web Security Appliance for one year.

Cisco Web Security Appliance is a stable solution.

As Cisco Web Security Appliance is an appliance, it doesn't scale. You need to size it based on your requirements, so if you're a small-scale customer, you'll size based on that. A large-scale customer gets a larger appliance and would need to size in advance, so you cannot scale that. Instead, you'll have to add boxes to add more load, so you can add to the cluster.

The initial setup for Cisco Web Security Appliance was pretty easy. It usually takes just a day or two to complete the deployment if you have all the information, but it's mostly the customers performing the initial setup because it's all done remotely.

I have no information on the licensing costs for Cisco Web Security Appliance.

I have customers that have thousands of users of Cisco Web Security Appliance, for example, five thousand users. I manage the migration for multiple customers.

My advice to anyone who wants to use Cisco Web Security Appliance is that it's a product that's easy to grasp if you know about proxy or any other firewall solution because it's pretty similar to other network security products in the market. If you have zero knowledge of network and security, it'll be difficult for you to understand Cisco Web Security Appliance.

My rating for Cisco Web Security Appliance is seven out of ten. It's a stable solution. It's not the best product, but it's a good product, and because it's on-premise and its visibility or availability on the cloud is minimal, many customers or companies prefer using it.

We use this solution for securing network traffic.

The Gateway is an advantage that I can see in Cisco. 

The WCCP is good at delivering HTTP and HTTPS traffic. Before this ping forwarding was a problem for us.

This solution offers categorization for YouTube and other specific applications from Facebook to WhatsApp, which can be controlled whether it's on mobile or PC.

You can partition your IPs based on scoring from Cisco Cloud.

There is a variety of options for integration with other products for authentication and authorization of users.

You can control everything through policy.

Technical support needs to be improved because they take a very long time and there is no communication or notification.

Controlling engines at the network layer needs to handle more links or multiple links from the internet.

Controlling with the applications, or more applications as part of the local applications so that it's bigger.

The price should be moderated.

I have been using this product in my daily operations for forty years.

When it comes to this technical support, sometimes it is not good. If you open a case with the local region here in the Middle East, sometimes also from the outside, the tech support takes a long time getting you logged in and troubleshooting files and screenshots.

They are not quick to respond or in the analysis, they don't even let you know what the current status is with my issue or a plan of resolving it.

I have been impacted often with issues regarding our integration from Cisco with this solution.

The technical support takes a lot of time without any feedback or any answers. They never even let you know if they are working on fixing it. 

After some time, I end up fixing it myself.

 And after a long time, I troubleshoot this issue and fix it myself. And notification would be cleared.

I know from the manager that the price is too high and that other solutions offer the same features for less.

There are some other powerful competitors such as ForcePoint and Symantec.

I use this product and implement it.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We are using the Cisco Web Security Appliance as part of the security in our data center. Our data center includes equipment and software from a variety of vendors including Cisco, Dell EMC, Microsoft, and Veritas.

This appliance gives me good visibility in the userbase and their activities. I can see what they are using, which websites they are browsing, a history for each user, and how much bandwidth they have utilized.

It integrates well into the Cisco environment.

The licensing model needs to be more flexible. How it works is that you can have from zero to 499 users at the first stage, then from 500 to 999 users at stage two, and so on. They need to be more flexible because when you exceed 1,000 users then you are supposed to deploy a separate appliance to cater to them.

The technical support could use some improvement.

We have been using the Cisco Web Security Appliance for three years.

The stability of this product is very good.

It is a scalable appliance that can integrate with my endpoint security appliances, as well as my core networking appliances. 

We acquired 200 additional licenses this year and we plan to continue increasing our usage.

We have been in contact with Cisco technical support and they are good. I would not say that they are the best, or highly recommended, but they are good.

The problem we experienced had to do with the ownership of the ticket. When we engage one engineer and explain everything, they continue to work on it until their shift ends. At that point, we have to explain everything to the next engineer, from scratch, and they continue to work on it. I think that one engineer should take ownership of the problem until it is complete.

We found the initial setup to be slightly complex because it was a new product for me and my team. We installed it in the Unity environment and tested it for quite some time. Then we deployed it slowly, starting with the back office and then rolling it out to the branches. The deployment took about four months to bring it from purchase, through a PoC, and into production.

Licensing fees are based on the number of users.

We evaluated several products but because we were already using Cisco, it was easy for us to get discounts on this appliance. It also integrated well with our existing environment.

My advice for anybody who is researching this appliance is to first determine exactly what it is that they require. There are a lot of applications and features but many of the features are useless for the organization. For example, if they do not need the DDoS features then they shouldn't get them and pay the additional fee.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The tool has good Umbrella DNS security. 

The tool needs to provide logs. They need to improve firewall threat defense. 

I have been working with Cisco products for more than two decades. 

I would rate the tool's scalability a seven out of ten. 

I would rate the product a seven out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for security and controlled internet access. We just finished deploying one for one of our clients that actually bought both devices. That was just before COVID that we implemented it, so we just finished it now.

There are different types of groups with different types of access depending on the policies for those departments or users. We've got the administrator, the normal users, and then the management. We allow certain users to have access to all of the sites as they do research as well as marketing. We also use those features to actually define the policies so that they can have access to those sites for advertising as well.

Most of the features are great. They've got great filtering. That's what the client was looking at in terms of users when they go out to the internet, to make sure that when they access, they access the sites that actually have been filtered by Cisco to make sure that those sites are secure and they don't have malware that they can download from those sites.

The stability is good.

It's a scalable product.

Technical support has been helpful.

The pricing is reasonable.

We just deployed it. I would just like to have more filters. However, I need more time to give a report to see what limitations may exist. 

During the setup, we had issues with updating the rules.

I would like more automation. When it's on a failover, everyone will think that they'll filter nicely.

We've been using the solution for almost four years now.  

We've been running the latest solution for eight months now and it is totally stable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

It is scalable. The clients that we have sold a few of those boxes to, did find integrating with AV software a bit expensive. However, it is possible to expand it.

Technical support is great. They're always on par. They're fine. So far, from what we've seen, they've always managed to respond.

It's a bit on the expensive side, I must say, however, when you look at the trends of the market, if you look where other services are going, the pricing is very close.

While the first assumption from clients is "Oh, Cisco devices are expensive," when you compare it with other devices, it's almost a tie. In general, the pricing of Cisco devices is not that bad.

We are a Cisco partner and a reseller.

We're integrating with the Cisco ISE as well. We bought the licenses for malware as well and then integrated them with the AD. That's been the new authentication for the users when they go into the internet with a specified group. 

I’d recommend the solution. The support from Cisco is excellent. Through my years working with Cisco, I would always recommend Cisco, any product that they provide, thanks to my years of experience.

I have, for the past six or seven years, deployed different types of deployments and I would say Cisco support is excellent. I have met a lot of good, skilled people in terms of support along the way. Especially on ISE as that's one of the more difficult products.

It works very well for what the client actually wants to achieve. You have put the policies in place according to the client’s needs. ISE helps ensure the policies are in place and working. We have logs, we have evidence.

As long as you put ISE in, it's going to tell you all the issues that you're having with your AD. If it's not configured properly, even if you’ve been running it for 15 years, you'll know. We can show how things may not be configured properly and how to fix them.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.