Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway Reviews

It is used for security purposes, CASB, and application controls.

I like the product's scalability and stability.

I want improvements in the application control. Also, the solution should have a secure channel because of malware.

I want technical support to be improved so that they can be faster and more knowledgeable.

I have been using Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway since 2016. Though I want to move to the cloud, I currently use an on-prem version.

It is a stable product.

It is a scalable solution. Around 1,50,000 users are using the solution in my company. We do have plans to increase the number of users in our company.

I have used Forcepoint's technical support, and I feel that it is average.

The initial setup was complex. The time taken for deployment was a year.

The deployment process involved the making of software-based applications. Then, we install it.

For the deployment and maintenance, we need five to seven people, including engineers and managers.

The implementation was done in-house.

I recommend the solution for small-scale businesses using a cloud-based version. For large-scale businesses, it is not fine.

Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

On-premises

Anyone working on application development, Ops or DevSecOps, or anyone who wants to redirect traffic from internal to external securely uses the Web Security Gateway. The product also provides a redirection function that is embedded in the Web Security Gateway.

Secure Gateway is similar from one brand to another, however, with Forcepoint, a big advantage is familiarity. Configuration and customized policies are easy to implement.

Currently, they are planning to improve by offering a cloud solution that covers the Web Security Gateway, CASB, as well as email and endpoint DLP. They are gearing towards a cloud-based platform for easier management and implementation.

The technology has been in use for about 15 years.

Stability is rated eight out of ten.

Scalability is close to eight or nine out of ten.

Technical support can be improved. It is currently provided from two locations, India and the US. Depending on the time, the call may be transferred to either country, which can lead to repetition of information as they do not seem to have a unified system.

Positive

Once the use case is identified, Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is easy to set up. The initial preparation involves understanding how data traffic will progress from external to internal and then back to external.

Forcepoint is competitively priced compared to McAfee. For a similar setup, Forcepoint might take fewer days to install, which means lower service fees.

The biggest competitor is McAfee. McAfee has a bigger market share in Singapore. However, in terms of functionality, they are the same.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Other

The biggest issues within the product were that it had become stagnant. For about four or five years, there was very little real innovation going on.

It felt as if they were just sitting back. They were lacking in regards to keeping up with the developments within the cloud. 

Overall, I think they had a good, solid product. I think they failed to add features. It was not as feature-rich as other products. I would say the biggest problem was the lack of features, they just hadn't kept up. Under Raytheon, they were starting to correct this, but it was a work in progress. Overall, the biggest problem with the product itself was the lack of features.

I knew that they needed to handle web sockets in some way, all we could do was effectively bypass it. There were too many times when the connections just didn't work right through the proxy. Our customers would have to bypass and basically go around the product. There were various levels to this and it was a real pain for our customers to diagnose those problems. There needed to be an end-product protocol analyzer output (for lack of a better way to put it), that would help administrators understand why the connection wasn't working.

There was so much legwork involved: someone would have to take a laptop and set up in front of the proxy; then they would have to load Wireshark (as I used to call it) and pull their captures; then they would have to give that to Forcepoint, or they would have to try to reason it out themselves. That caused a lot of problems because most administrations weren't confident or competent enough to do it.

They didn't have the skill-set needed to make proper use of those tools in the first place for analysis. There were a lot of customers who could've gotten value from the product but who were put in a position where they had to basically bypass the product because of certain connections. Some form of connection-troubleshooting should be included within the product, more than just looking at a log that nobody knows how to read except for support. 
There was no way to troubleshoot connections in an effective manner that didn't require a lot of legwork by the user. Whenever you ask a user to do that, nine out of 10 times, they're not going to do it. They're just going to take the easy way out, bypass it, and then they'll bitch about the product, but they won't actually fix it. They won't want to make the extra effort. The problem just remains unsolved. They needed something like a connection analyzer tool to explain why, or at least give a better indication of why this was failing.

Again, it was the lack of development. The GUI is quite nice. I think it's very natural for people once they get used to it. Ironically, the company I'm working for now is actually POCing the DOV product and one of the things they like is the interface. They had a lot of good synergy with their other products. They failed to capitalize on it, ultimately. They're getting there. They got better, but it might be too little too late. That's the problem.

I have been using this solution for nine and a half years.

Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway was pretty stable.

Scalability-wise, It was pretty good. We had deployments that were easily over 10,000 — it could handle it if you scaled it properly with the right hardware. There were deployments that were 34,000 at that point. Now, with very large enterprises (with over 60,000 employees), that's where it starts to get a little tricky. They managed to get the product to that point but it was not cheap either, but it was achieved on the scale pretty well.

The biggest issue that hampered Forcepoint was the lack of development and good consistent support. Because of this, they went from 50,000 to 60,000 customers, down to 16,000 in the space of about three years.

That's a huge drop. A lot of that came down to Palo Alto and a couple of others jumping in the game with filtering but at the same time, Forcepoint had people who were loyal, but they were giving up because of the support situation. 

I constantly dealt with customer support. There wasn't a week that went by where I didn't have to talk to somebody.

They knew me by name and I knew them by name and we were all one big happy family, but when they moved from San Diego to Austin, they lost people.

They gave good, consistent support for about a year, but then they began losing staff because they weren't paying enough. They hired a bunch of people and claimed that they adjusted their wages, but then the same cycle occurred another year later.

That's been the biggest problem. It wasn't the product that caused them to lose people (even though they had some innovation issues), it was the support. At the end of the day, the innovation was causing them to look weak in customers' eyes; when you couple that with the support problems, that's when they started really losing customers.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

In fact, you could literally load it, install it, and have it up and working in no time. All you had to do was point a browser to it and you could prove it worked. Now, if we wanted to take it and fully integrate it onto the network, then nine times out of ten, we used one particular method called WCCP.

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

The product was sitting at about a seven. Support was dragging it down to a six. So, if I had to be honest, they had some very good analytics — just counting the product itself, I would say it's a seven.

It wasn't perfectly stable, but it was pretty good. I would say it would need to be more feature-rich. It would need to be more helpful for troubleshooting problems with connections and it would need more stability — then I would give it a higher rating. Under all of those things, it's the support that's the problem because that's a different question from the product itself — it's the Achilles heel.

On-premises

We primarily use the product for web filtering and enhancing our organization's web security posture.

The web filtering feature, despite its challenges, has been somewhat effective.

The product could improve its automation capabilities, improve integration with virtualization, and enhance its web filtering specifics. Additionally, it could benefit from adopting proprietary ASICs to improve performance and throughput.

Future releases should include features found in FortiGate and Palo Alto, such as improved SD-WAN management, better monitoring of rules and interfaces, live traffic monitoring, and more user-friendly troubleshooting methodologies.

I have been using Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway for three to four years.

The platform is fairly stable but has limitations in terms of performance and throughput.

The product is not as scalable as FortiGate and Palo Alto.

The initial setup was not complex; following the guide allowed a smooth configuration process.

Forcepoint's pricing is moderate. However, transitioning to solutions like Palo Alto or FortiGate, despite potentially higher initial costs, could offer better long-term value due to their advanced features and performance.

We evaluated other technologies including Palo Alto and FortiGate.

The product is relatively easy to configure if you follow the guide, but it lacks throughput and performance compared to competitors. In our experience, the technical support has been underutilized.

The solution needs better SD-WAN management, improved monitoring, and more effective troubleshooting tools like Palo Alto and FortiGate.

I rate it an eight out of ten.

I use Forcepoint SWG to monitor and control my employees' internet usage for both security and productivity reasons. 

What I like about Forcepoint SWG is that I can ensure that employees access only appropriate websites, protecting the organization from malicious threats. Moreover, SWG allows me to track internet usage patterns, helping optimize bandwidth and understand how much time each employee spends online.

In terms of improvement, some of my clients find that certain security details could be enhanced in Forcepoint SWG. Additionally, I would suggest focusing on improving the GUI's stability, especially when implementing new filters or patches. Occasionally, there are issues with crashes during these updates, and smoother transitions would greatly enhance the user experience. 

I have been working with Forcepoint SWG for five years.

I would rate the stability of the solution as a ten out of ten.

Forcepoint SWG is scalable and can handle organizations with over 100,000 users. Additionally, through multiple deployments and clustering, it can scale even further, making it well-suited for medium to enterprise-level companies.

I would rate Forcepoint's technical support as a nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup for Forcepoint SWG is straightforward and user-friendly. The basic configuration is not very complicated, and you can have the solution deployed in a day. However, when it comes to more advanced configurations or customer-specific enhancements, it can get a bit complex. While the initial steps are smooth, customization might require more effort and expertise.

I would rate the affordability of Forcepoint SWG as a two out of ten. It is relatively expensive. While some other products, such as firewalls and application firewalls, offer similar functionalities, they might be more cost-effective. However, the specific web security features provided by Forcepoint contribute to its high price.

Overall, I would rate Forcepoint SWG as a ten out of ten.

I have found the simplicity of the solution valuable. The dashboard and reports are good as well.

Our experience thus far with Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway has not been good. The availability of clusters is limited, and the product is very unstable. The development team is slow as well.

There have been a lot of changes in the network at Forcepoint, and we've had downtimes of almost three hours. This happened six times from August to December.

When Forcepoint moves user traffic to another cluster during maintenance, the transaction is not smooth for end users. They lose access to the internet.

In the Middle East, the ISPs block the IPs of Forcepoint, and the Forcepoint compliance team has been unable to resolve these issues.

Forcepoint should focus on understanding how Zscaler works.

In the next release, they should provide an inbuilt, full-fledged DLP CASB feature.

Forcepoint should also work on improving their communication regarding maintenance.

I've been working with this solution for the past seven months.

We have experienced several problems with stability, so I would rate the solution at four out of ten for stability.

I would rate Forcepoint's scalability at seven out of ten. 

We have 75,000 end users and around 300 IT specialists who use this solution.

Technical support staff take a long time to understand and resolve issues. You will need to implement a workaround yourself as technical support may take six months to resolve an issue. This can be the case even when the ticket is escalated. Therefore, I would rate technical support at four on a scale from one to ten.

Neutral

The initial setup can be complex depending on the location. For instance, in the Middle East, we have to use our direct endpoint client. In Europe, we use the proxy endpoint client.

The cost for Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is lower than that for Zscaler and Netskope. It could be around $4 per user annually.

I would not recommend Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway because of all the issues and give it an overall rating of five out of ten.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The use case is that they don't want a proxy on-premises. They want everything to be on the cloud, with all processing happening before it reaches the firewall. Typically, in a traditional scenario, when I try to access a website like gmail.com, the request goes through the firewall. The router, and is cached, with multiple security measures applied on-premises. Forcepoint handles all these processes on the backend, so the customer doesn't need to worry about on-premises infrastructure. 

Everything is handled on the backend side. Users don't need to have any proxy on-premises. The solution handles all the dirty or initial traffic from their network, managing it on the backend itself.

The technical support needs to be improved.

It simplifies security by enabling partners to implement it straightforwardly. DLP is essential and requires capable engineers for effective deployment. Currently, opportunities may involve high implementation costs, handled either by distributors or directly by Forcepoint.

I have been using Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway as a reseller. We are selling Forcepoint V5000 appliances.

Stability depends upon connectivity. If your connectivity is good, you get the best stability.

I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

You need to add the number of users and configure them. 5000 users are using this solution. It is suitable for enterprise customers.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

Forcepoint offers two levels of support: standard support and premium support. With standard support, you can open a ticket, but you may need to wait up to 24 hours for a response, and sometimes the engineers might not be available promptly. Premium support, which comes at a higher price, promises quicker response times. There is a lack of qualified engineers and partners to implement the Secure Web Gateway.

Neutral

The initial setup is difficult. Integrating it involves connecting with multiple parameters such as data servers, file servers, and email management systems. This integration process can be pretty complex and challenging.

Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway can typically be installed within one day for a hundred users. However, for larger deployments, such as 1,000 or 5,000 users, the installation process may require at least a month.

The product has average pricing.

I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

If you want to deploy Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway on-premises, you'll need a server, a switch, and a firewall, among other components. This setup involves significant initial investment, which affects ROI and total cost of ownership. While a proxy can handle some aspects, it doesn't provide the comprehensive security features that Forcepoint offers.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure

Secure Web Gateway's most valuable features are firewall blocking and anti-malware scanning.

The automation lifecycle, integration, and export functionality could all be improved.

I've been using Secure Web Gateway for over three years.

Secure Web Gateway is a stable solution.

This solution is scalable.

Forcepoint's technical support is good, but in the future, I'd like them to provide more tutorial documentation.

The initial setup was simple.

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud