Barracuda Content Shield (discontinued) vs. Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway

Barracuda Content Shield is well suited to large companies with many employees that are based in many areas and have various aspects of their job that need them to be on the internet at all times and in many cases opening themselves to many threats. It may be less appropriate for small companies that are in individualized clusters

Incentivized

Over the years, [in our experience], the maintenance of the Forcepoint Web Security solution proved to be more cumbersome and troublesome with each version upgrade. In addition, it did not transition well to support the large increase of remote workers. We also experienced weird incompatibilities with the client. We have since replaced this solution with Zscaler Internet Access, a cloud-based secure web gateway solution with a client that behaves as expected, is more flexible, and requires significantly less administration.

Incentivized

• Easy to use
• Layout of program looks like an email so its easy to read and identify
• Helped many suspicious senders from getting into our system

Incentivized

• It prevents users from accessing websites that may have recently been created for the purpose of distributing malware.
• It prevents users from accidentally or intentionally accessing websites that are considered inappropriate for a work environment.
• It allows us to create different policies for different teams in our organization.

Incentivized

• Increased policy customization
• Filtering policy preferences
• Increased manual settings

Incentivized

• The user access logs contain a lot of useless information. I understand this is very hard to tackle as I've seen this across any product that logs web activity.
• I would like to see more customization options of website block pages.

Incentivized

It is very stable, the organisation has "locked in" the product and has no plans to change or try another product. We have already renewed our 2019-2020 licenses. It is user friendly and people catch on easily when they first use it. The only downtime is when we install Microsoft updates! It has excellent reporting which help in determining how the organisation's Internet is used and also during both internal and external IT audits.

Incentivized

I think the program is easy to use, I think there are more functions it can have or better ability to customize the layout so it doesn't look so plain

Incentivized

Despite the intimidating Linux CLI when you use the appliance for troubleshooting, the web security usability compensates as most of the Administration of the system is done there. It is GUI based and has an easy to use UI where one can navigate around rather easily like getting reports, checking alerts, looking the whole setup under deployment to check if all services are running in one place though there are other parts to the system.

Incentivized

I have only had to call twice for access issues but it has been overall a normal experience.

Incentivized

The is a quick first response to acknowledge your issue and the Engineers never take more than two hours to fix an issue and we hardly get issues looking at the fact that the system is pretty stable. There is also a robust Knowledge Base in the site for known problems.

Incentivized

Research known issues with upgrading from the Support Knowledge base, this will enable you avoid road blocks along the way and reduce your dependence on Forcepoint Support

Incentivized

Barracuda Content Shield was compared to this product and in our opinion was more robust and cost effective for our growing firm. Barracuda allowed us to create filtering that worked for our firm and allowed us to make the customization easy so that all employees had access to what they needed and were not shut out.

Incentivized

To be honest, once using Forcepoint for our Web Security, I have not wanted to look anywhere else. The dashboard gives me quick insight of threats, productivity, and bandwidth usage. Again, this is a layer in my security and it fills many holes. I feel safe and I do like I can just let it do its thing

Incentivized

• Increased Reporting Times
• Threat Training time increase
• Policy enforcement increased time

Incentivized

• Being a non-profit the cost is a bit higher than some competitors so our ROI takes a bit longer to recoup. I would really like to see better non-profit pricing.
• The ease of doing a report on someone cuts down on the IT man-hours to do website tracking for managers as we can do it from a central point whereas in the past (prior to Forcepoint/Websense) we would have to ghost their machine to look for activity as well as their local servers.

Incentivized