Cisco Web Security Appliance Valuable Features

Rainier S. - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Integration Engineering / Enterprise Technology & Innovation at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

SSL decryption was one of the features we wanted to experiment with but did not get around to because of time constraints. 

What we liked best about it was the ability to apply policy to either a user ID or an IP-based network. Your customers are either people or machines. We chose not to create a service account for the server/machine, we had to have an IP address, based on a subnet and then applied policy to that.

View full review »
DA
Business Architect at Letris

The solution provides good web reputation and anti-malware protection. 

URL filtering and parameter controls are not used in business or enterprise implementations but are good. 

View full review »
BhanuSingh - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy Manager Infra & Security at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Cisco regularly upgrades features for the customer's security requirements. They've added new features to the product and upgraded the OS version so that users will get the latest security features. Cisco WSA's malware protection, AMP, and DNS security are valuable.

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
Cisco Web Security Appliance
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Cisco Web Security Appliance. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Atdhe Zyhranaj - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Security Consultant at NSCON Network Services & Consulting GmbH

It works really well. It operates beautifully once everything is configured. 

It also allows you to decrypt SSL traffic, and that's a really important feature as well, which is something I also configured.

The solution is easy to set up.

The virtual machine is quite scalable.

It's stable. 

View full review »
Muhammad Hussain - PeerSpot reviewer
Unit Head System Administration & Automation at MCB Islamic Bank Ltd

The bandwidth limit is useful. The categories are pre-defined by Cisco. 

It's a very user-friendly product and is easy to set up.

The product is stable.

It's a scalable product.

View full review »
AnilKumar29 - PeerSpot reviewer
DGM - Pre-Sales at Niveshan Technologies India Pvt. Ltd.

This solution helps our customers with the challenges their clients face attempting to connect to their network or app. It's very good for large enterprise organizations. 

View full review »
Zaid Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
L2 - Network Engineer at Sitel Group (previously Sykes)

Cisco Web Security Appliance has very good security benefits for any company and is easy to integrate. The primary use of having a proxy is to hide the actual user from the open internet. We opted for Cisco Web Security Appliance because Cisco's TAC support is outstanding. It's good to have products from Cisco. All the network equipment, like the routers and firewalls, are usually from Cisco.

View full review »
Stanislav Priscak - PeerSpot reviewer
IT specialist at Východoslovenský ústav srdcových a cievnych chorôb, a.s.

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.

View full review »
ChrisWanyoike - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Infrastructure Specialist at Central-Bank-Kenya

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

View full review »
Md Manirul Islam - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant general manager at Beximcocomputers

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.

View full review »
Surendar Ganesan - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

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.

View full review »
MF
Network Security Engineer & Systems Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

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.

View full review »
KM
Production of pharmaceutical products at khaled.miles@labosalem.com

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. 

View full review »
Usman Rasool - PeerSpot reviewer
VP - Head Enterprise Technology Infrastructure at MCB Islamic Bank Ltd.

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.

View full review »
PK
UI Developer at ANB SYSTEMS PRIVATE LIMITED

The tool has good Umbrella DNS security. 

View full review »
Vusa Ndlovu - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Solution Architect at Nexio South Africa

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.

View full review »
ED
Owner at Jolly Security Inc

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.

View full review »
DA
Business Architect at Letris

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. 

View full review »
JO
Network Support Engineer at a government with 201-500 employees

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.

View full review »
MM
Network Administrator at GAEB

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

View full review »
RS
Sr. Network Security Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

The most valuable feature is that we can use it as a proxy.

View full review »
AT
Deputy General Manager at BTS Group

The most valuable features is of the solution is that it is user-friendly and we get good web security from it.

View full review »
YK
Director at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

It's most valuable feature is its convenience.

View full review »
it_user1272714 - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrating engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The most valuable feature is security.

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
Cisco Web Security Appliance
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Cisco Web Security Appliance. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.