IBM Secure Gateway vs. Sophos Cloud Web Gateway (discontinued)

Datapower external connectivity is made easy with built-in client provisions in gateway servers. [There are] other use cases if you need to access resources in IBM Cloud with enterprise connectivity setup.

Incentivized

Sophos Secure Web Gateway works perfectly for any SMB/Enterprise environment where the IT Admin wants to control the internet. With that said, I can not think of an organization that doesn't need to control or audit the usage of their internet.

Incentivized

• Ease of setup
• Integrated Datapower clients
• Console based management in IBM Cloud

Incentivized

• When IT Admins need to deploy virtually.
• When IT Admins want to have high availability without an extra cost (via the Virtual Appliance Deployment).
• When IT Admins want to control and give the internet fair use within the organization.

Incentivized

• Product documentation on setting up various client use cases
• Flexible plan
• Deployment options beyond saas

Incentivized

• Administrator Permissions: There's not enough granularity on the administrative side. We ran into an issue where we wanted to restrict junior admins from being able to see traffic per user. But in doing so, it also prevented them from adusting some other settings they had to have access to, like setting exceptions for sites.
• CA Database: I occasionally run into issues where the list of certificate authorities in the appliance is not up to date, and I have to manually add a CA. These aren't rare, never-heard-of authorities, either, but they are usually subsidiaries of one of the major ones.
• Feedback: Sometimes it takes some good detective skills to track down why a legitimate site isn't working. It's often because of content hosted elsewhere (images, for example), but the reports aren't always clear as to what actually gets blocked. It takes some trial and error sometimes to unblock something that should be okay for our business.

Incentivized

I had experience in the past with Barracuda and WatchGuard. Barracuda was fine, although I found it harder to configure and administrate. Less intuitive, but possibly more robust. WatchGuard was a nightmare, it either blocked too many things or not enough, and the rules were too complex. I would pick Sophos over either of these, both for ease of use, and for cost.

Incentivized

• Was able to quickly set up vpn tunnel with our IBM Cloud resources access. That helped to get quick time to market.

Incentivized

• We have not had a single instance of malware since installing Web Gateway. We have other ways to prevent infections and attacks, of course, so this is just one tool in the box, but we had a handful before this from people visiting sites they should not have. Web Gateway has prevented those, at least.
• There was some pushback initially as users had to deal with some business sites not working (usually due to CA problems). After the initial growing pains, however, we've seen very few other problems.
• The appliance updates itself, in the middle of the night, so that reduces some overhead and planned downtime.

Incentivized