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.

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.