Cisco Web Security Appliance Reviews

Our company works solely on government projects. Hyperconverged infrastructure is one portion of our use case for Web Security Appliance because it's a bundled solution that includes cyber security, network, the passive component, storage, and HCI. We are based in India and we have over 10,000 employees. We are a Cisco gold partner and I am deputy general manager of presales.

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. 

There are occasional delays in customer support but it's a minor thing. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable which is important in our situation because we have a five-year plan to increase users. 

The support is great, almost perfect. We directly communicate with the Cisco India team.

Positive

The initial setup is easy and our customers are satisfied with the deployment and the support we provide in that respect. We work with two or three engineers per site and deployment usually takes somewhere between 10 to 15 days.

Licensing is calculated by the number of users and paid on an annual basis. The license includes technical support. The solution is not expensive. 

Cisco Web Security Appliance is used to secure users from malicious threats across the internet and applications they access on different cloud platforms. It is a dedicated solution for protecting users from various internet threats and provides a centralized dashboard for visibility and control over accessed apps.

The solution offers content filtering and micro-content controls, such as regulating the types of images and their resolution. It provides granular controls over media being accessed on social platforms, ensuring that content not in the company's interest is restricted.

The product is great, however, incorporating features offered by competitors would be beneficial. Competitors sometimes highlight features that Cisco products lack. Additional features like improved whitelisting and blacklisting of malicious websites could enhance the product.

I have been using Cisco Web Security Appliance for several years, more than seven or eight, approximately eight or nine years.

The solution is subscription-based, making scaling possible.

Cisco offers intense and comprehensive technical support services, making it a strong selling point.

Positive

The installation requires a skilled resource who understands the product technology and its features. Deployment is not straightforward due to the complexity of the functions and considerations involved.

Cisco provides Mentored Installation Services through specialized service delivery partners to ensure proper deployment.

Pricing is competitive and varies across sectors. Public sector clients receive good pricing, whereas enterprise or commercial clients might not find the pricing as favorable.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use Cisco Web Security Appliance as a forward proxy, and all the web requests to the web servers are filtered through it.

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.

Cisco lacks a GUI-based troubleshooting feature compared to products by other vendors. There might be some instances where the proxy is blocking some genuine traffic. It could take a lot of troubleshooting with Cisco Web Security Appliance proxy, which could otherwise be easily identified by a GUI-based troubleshooting tool.

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

Around 60 to 70 users are using Cisco Web Security Appliance in our organization.

I haven't set it up, but I believe Cisco Web Security Appliance's initial setup is easy.

I wouldn't recommend the solution to other users because Cisco has already announced the end of the light for the Cisco Web Security Appliance proxy. Cisco is no longer going to support it.

Overall, I rate Cisco Web Security Appliance a six 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.

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 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 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.