Cisco Web Security Appliance Reviews

We use Cisco Web Security Appliance for many things like firewalls, site-to-site VPN, routing, etc. We can use it for remote work. 

Cisco Web Security Appliance can integrate with Active Directory, enabling us to manage all the end-users within AD.  It's helpful for setting rules based on individual users and groups. For example, you can configure policies for inbound and outbound traffic. 

Cisco Web Appliance is highly stable if configured correctly. 

I rate Cisco Web Appliance eight out of 10 for scalability. 

I rate Cisco support nine out of 10. 

Positive

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. 

I rate Cisco Web Security Appliance 10 out of 10. It's a complete security solution.

We primarily use the solution to verify the identity of users that are connecting to the network. It's used to check the compliance of their systems before they are able to connect.

There isn't that much to it. It's not overly complex.

The scalability is good.

The deployment process is very simple.

Technical support is okay.

The stability could be better. 

The solution needs to be more user-friendly and easier to navigate. It's not so easy right now. 

I've been using the solution for five years at this point. I've used it for a while. 

The stability is lacking and is something that should be looked at. We don't find it to be very stable.

The solution offers good scalability. If a company need sot expand it, it can do so. It's not a problem.

We have about 50,000 users on the solution currently.

We've contacted technical support in the past and they have been fine. Cisco has relatively good technical support.

We did not previously use a different solution.

The solution is very easy to implement. It's not overly complex or too difficult. Our deployment took about six months.

We have five team members that can handle setups and maintenance tasks. They are engineers.

While we did do some of the initial setup ourselves, we did also have a consultant come in to assist in certain areas from time to time. 

There is a one-time licensing fee that needs to be paid. 

We are using the latest version of the solution, however, I cannot speak to the exact version number.

I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten. It's an okay solution that needs better stability.

I would recommend the solution to other companies and organizations. 

We use Cisco Web Security Appliance as a security proxy when using the web.

It integrates well with Cisco Email Security Appliance. This way, even if a customer clicks on a link that is malicious, thanks to Cisco Web Security Appliance, you have a second chance to protect your website.

Integration-wise, browser-security-wise (for users browsing the internet), it's one of the greatest tools.

This appliance is quite accurate when it comes to categorial filtering. However, It's not as sophisticated as Blue Coat, which features malware blue, malware red, and malware yellow filters. Sometimes I feel that Blue Coat actually has too many categories, which can be confusing — the granularity is good, but the quantity is too much.

Sometimes reporting is a little bit short. Cisco has always put more emphasis on developing big products that are very robust security-wise, rather than focusing on developing solutions with a lot of bells and whistles. In other words, it's not beautiful, but it gets the job done.

Reporting is not so beautiful compared to other solutions, it's not so cute and colorful; however, it does a very good job in the areas that it supports — because it detects malware and malicious code. There is a ton of intelligence behind it.

I have been using this solution since it was first released.

Cisco Web Security Appliance is not the cheapest solution on the market, but it's well worth it.

Implementation has to be done right, it's very important. It's not enough just to connect it — that won't make the traffic go through. 

You have to really think about how you want to route the traffic. It's for HTTP and HTTPS. Speaking of HTTPS, you have to consider the well-done proxying, otherwise, you will be breaking internet security because you'll have issues with the certificates, et cetera. So you have to do a very well-planned integration.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight. Security-wise, it's a great product.

Web Security Appliance is a proxy and I have gotten active with the open-source proxy. If I want a feature that is not present, most of the database updates and filters are good. Our clients use Cisco Palace which is a very big database that is very quickly updated.

It also has high availability. These kinds of solutions impact the user experience. If you have an issue with the proxy not responding, you have to install or activate new does in order to reestablish the connections for the customer. 

There are some problems with this solution but it's not related to this product. If a user wants to use it for other devices like mobile or smartphones, this product isn't so reliable. If you want to implement it in a track point mode, it is difficult to implement and is not so reliable. There should be more implementation. 

I have been using Cisco Web Security Appliance for five to six years. 

It's very stable. We have thousands of users and they don't have any issues with it. It's very stable.

If you want this product to be stable you have to put it through the EPS and you have to manage the connection to the power. If you shut down the product, there will be a problem because they encrypt the discs and you'll have hardware loss. The solution won't work. 

It's very scalable. If you buy one bundle with 100 users, you can install unlimited appliances to scale horizontally. You can have ten appliances that can log share communications. It's very scalable. 

We have contacted Cisco support for other products. I am satisfied with their support. It depends on the level of the technician you get. If you are an end-user you start with level one help which isn't so easy. If you request escalation to the next level you get a good level of support. 

I only used an open-source solution. Cisco's advantage is the support and they have good scalability which is not so easy to implement in other solutions. 

The level of complexity of the initial setup will depend on the level of customization. If you want to start the product with the best practices presented by Cisco, it's very easy. You have to manage your own IP addresses and check that the service is okay. It's integrated with other services and then apply it to your users. It's very easy to implement. You need a high level of skills to manage it. If you want special customization or a high level of security activation, it may be a bit more complex. 

For a single appliance without any high-appliance activated and if you have all the data, DNS servers, and IP addresses, it can around an hour to implement.

Try it. See how it works, it's not difficult to implement and it's not so expensive. I would recommend it. 

I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

In the next release, I would like to see reporting to implement more features. The license should also be more flexible. 

We use the tool as a filter and proxy. 

Since working with the tool, we have not found any threats in our organization. 

The solution is priced high. 

I have been working with the product for three years. 

We have not faced any issues with stability. 

The solution is scalable and we have around 1200 users for the product. 

I have used Fortinet FortiGate before. We switched to Cisco because its sandbox is more effective and the solution is more scalable. However, FortiGate has a simple user interface. 

The solution's deployment phase lasted around three months. 

We did the product's deployment in-house. 

The solution has a standard license. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. 

We use this solution to restrict prohibited websites and applications. It's a good solution.

Within our organization, there are roughly 400 people using this solution.

We plan to continue using this solution. 

This solution could be more secure.

Purpose-wise, I don't necessarily see the point of this solution. Users can gain access to restricted content easily with a simple VPN. It just seems like a waste of money to me.

In my opinion, this kind of technology should be available in a bundle. If internet security and web security were bundled together, that would be great.

I have been using Cisco Web Security Appliance for two years. 

Sometimes support takes a while to respond to us. Honestly, I have had better support from other vendors in the past. 

Deployment and maintenance require two to three technicians. 

We typically purchase either a one-year, three-year, or five-year license.

I would recommend this solution to others. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of six. 

We have implemented Cisco Web Security Appliance in quite a few places and the results are quite satisfactory. We haven't faced any kind of challenge from it. Neither has the customer reported anything.

I am a solution architect. So I'm able to discuss in terms of configuration management. All I can say is that from a solution perspective, whatever the customer is basically looking for from our web security appliance, Cisco Web Security Appliance has met it all. And more importantly, wherever we have deployed this kind of Web Security Appliance, Cisco hasn't faced any kind of escalation from our customers. And whenever we go for review with them for their satisfaction level, we have always heard that this is one of the products that they are very satisfied with.

Obviously there is always room for improvement for almost all the appliances available in the market. But there are scopes for improvement. I'm pretty sure that Cisco will keep on integrating different feature sets as the market demands and I have seen Cisco as an organization that puts in proactive efforts providing different features before they come into the market. So I'm pretty sure that Cisco will give due diligence in terms of providing all the features in their WSA. 

But one thing I don't like with Cisco is that they're very fragmented in terms of feature sets. What I mean is that the one thing I don't like about Cisco is that they are very much fragmented in terms of providing the complete solution. They keep on breaking their different feature sets into different boxes. The days are coming when almost all the customers are looking for a consolidated box or a box wherein you can have multiple feature sets based on infrastructure, which will decrease the carbon footprint in the data center. Then, obviously, the number of devices they will have in the data center will go down. So cooling requirements and power requirements will also go down. So that's what the customer is looking at. But Cisco is too segmented. They gave ESA, they gave WSA, they give their next-generation Firewall Firepower. Then they gave a management center. And for network AMP they made a separate box set. So there are too many devices.

Though I understand technically that, yes, fragmented technology is best because we should let the dedicated device do dedicated jobs. But again, in terms of customer acceptability and the customer's point of view, consolidated devices make much more sense for them.

I would obviously prefer the WSA to be integrated with ESA because there is no point putting so many hardware devices and infrastructures in. So if WSA had the functionality of ESA, at least the basic functionality of ESA, it could be merged into a single box, and that would be good.

Cisco Web Security Appliance is stable. Very recently we deployed corporate-wide security practices with all the Cisco devices like Cisco Firepower, Cisco AMP, Cisco Cloud Email Security, Umbrella, and so on and so forth. That infrastructure is running quite okay for the last two to two and a half years. So I must say that all the security products are quite stable in nature.

Cisco is the best in giving technical support. There is no doubt about that. I am working with Cisco on a range of products since 2004.

I have dealt with all their technical related support. I used to be in deployment. Then I used a lot of their super technical support. But once I migrated from the implementation team to the solution designing team, I did not require that kind of technical support from them in terms of their technical assistance. But yes, I still have discussions with my implementation team and they keep telling me that one of the best features is the technical support we get from Cisco. So as far as technical support is concerned, I don't think that there is a match for Cisco.

Regarding Cisco price-wise, it is always a bit on the higher side. Apart from a few products, if you look at the majority of Cisco products, they are a bit on the higher side as far as the market is concerned. Obviously it would be good if Cisco could cut down on their prices, but they would have to do a lot of negotiation or compromise in terms of their product quality and support quality and a lot of customers may not like that. Price is something very dynamic. In India, actually, we don't find that much of a challenge with prices in enterprises and in government.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give Cisco Web Security Appliance an 8.

We use this solution as our web security gateway and as an additional proxy.

The support for the solution could be improved as there are issues with SMARTnet support.

I have used this solution for three years. 

We have 500 users using this solution. 

The support for this solution could be improved. We have experienced issues with their SMARTnet support system. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

This is an expensive solution.

We have compared other solutions for security such as Forcepoint, Barracuda Networks, Symantec as we are considering moving away from using this solution. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.