Cisco Secure Web Appliance vs. UniFi Cloud Gateways

Based on the platforms I have evaluated, I think the WSA is a great fit for any organization that needs a proxy server that provides control over what web sites are accessed or when they can be accessed. I think it is probably overkill if you simply need a proxy server for bandwidth savings or because you need to proxy general Internet access without extensive filtering needs.

Incentivized

The Ubiquiti Wireless WAN solution can be used in both small and large corporate environments. However, as it has a rather high cost, its cost-benefit is greater in medium and large corporations, as small corporations may not take advantage of as many resources as the integration between Wi-Fi devices. In medium and large corporations, resources like this represent a very great facility in network management and in the availability of the connection in a transparent way at different points of the company, together with the security of isolated networks logically being made available by the same Wi-Fi device.

Incentivized

• It does a great job of filtering emails based on IP reputation. This feature works particularly very well. Cisco has a vast database of IP reputation scores and therefore offers very few false positives and negatives.
• It checks each email thoroughly without any compromise of privacy. Any malicious link present in the body of the email makes its way to the quarantine. The IP reputation scores also help in this case.

Incentivized

• Automatically load balances based on band. Makes it simple to spread out users.
• Updates can be set to automatic or manual. Automatic uses rolling updates, happens every time we update the controller.
• Continually add new features and improvements with their FREE software upgrades

Incentivized

• The categories provided are not as granular as some competitors, like Websense.
• Cisco does not have as many resources devoted to categorizing websites as some competitors, like Websense.
• New features require administrators to pay attention to updates. New features are disabled by default.

Incentivized

• Supply can be a problem, especially for new products. We have had to sometimes wait for months for supply to come in.
• No phone support. Only email/chat. can be frustrating sometimes just texting someone, but have not had to contact them very often.

Incentivized

Because it's one of those products you almost don't realize it exists from the end user. From the administrator perspective, you can do everything on its web interface and it's very intuitive to manage, once you know the concepts behind identities, acls, etc. Also, once you build the control structure, I mean, you link 'local' groups with your own Active Directory groups, as we did here, you don't need to be managing those things on the appliance itself.

Incentivized

The combination of performance, range, low-power use, and manageability made it ideal for us.

Our experience with Cisco's support was terrible. Other than the fact that they don't respond to service-related emails with urgency, they also keep on changing the policies that affected us. Recently, they came up with a new look for the same software, which was insanely slow. Renewal of keys for the old interface took months. Overall, the support was not very friendly from the users' point of view.

Incentivized

We have not needed to contact support, except to replace one device that was damaged in shipping. The company immediately issued an RMA without delay, and we had our replacement product within a week

Considering we're with Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliances for the last 9 years, as I stated, we don't have too much experience with other producs. What I can say is that in the past, we evaluated Websense before it became Forcepoint and we also used MS ISA Server for webfilter. As you may imagine, IronPort is a very very superior product.

Incentivized

Prior to this, we used Cisco Meraki wireless access points, which did not allow for centralized control, therefore several access points shared the same SSID. Because the client's movement from one device to another was not as seamless and reliable as it is with the current Ubiquiti solution, this shift cost both time and stability during configuration.

Incentivized

• Having a much safer work system has given us the guarantee and security of always staying out of danger.
• The prevention system is important for us and always keeping our devices, web and emails free of any malicious agent has allowed us an excellent workflow, without distractions or inconvenience in the development of projects.
• Thanks to the fact that we have kept our work system safe, we have saved ourselves a lot of inconvenience, time spent, avoiding equipment damage, payments to solve problems, among many other problems that thanks to Cisco Secure Web Appliance we have been able to solve.

Incentivized

• Huge cost savings. Buy it once and you are done, no annual renewals.
• Extremely reliable and scalable. We went from 0 to 900 Chromebooks in 2 years.
• Very little maintenance, set it and forget it. Allows us to focus on other tasks.

Incentivized