Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL] Reviews

The primary use for this solution is to protect the private IP for our customers who do not want to disclose it. It is also used for granular control of web access for employees, including how they are using the internet and what sites they are visiting. It provides control over how much data they are using, as well as what kind of data they are uploading and downloading from internet websites.

One of our customers is a leading bank in India, with more than ten thousand employees across the globe. They did not have any restrictions or control over what kinds of sites the employees should or should not access. Since the implementation of this solution, the bandwidth has decreased and the performance in terms of internet access has increased.

The most valuable feature is the Policy Manager. After that, the Proxy Reporter is the next best function. You can integrate it with a cloud proxy as well as DLP.

It would be great if the product had inbuilt queuing for Quality of Service. They do have a solution, but for that, you need to buy another appliance.

This is definitely a stable product.

The scalability of this solution is fantastic.

The number of boxes depends on how many users are creating concurrent sessions and the bandwidth of their organization. The bank where this solution was implemented has more than ten thousand users.

They have fantastic technical support.

If you have to replace the appliance then you just have to send back what you have.

I have not previously worked on another solution, but I am familiar with the competitors.

If you have previously worked on the product then it is quite simple. However, if you are new to it then the implementation is a little bit tricky.

On the Cloud Proxy, the deployment takes less than one day. If you are using the ProxySG or the on-premises solution, it will take one to two weeks depending on the policy configuration, the size of the organization, and what kinds of policies are needed.

The number of staff you need to maintain the solution depends on the size of the organization, and how many changes occur on a daily basis. If you have one thousand employees then you need at least one employee to look after it.

We handle the implementation of this solution for our customers.

There is a perpetual license, except for URL filtering that you have to renew annually.

Additional features, such as Flash Proxies, have their own licensing fees that depend on what the requirements are.

I have reviewed the Gartner Magic Quadrant Report. From that, I know the competitors, where the vendors stand, and what the drawbacks are.

It is important to determine the proper requirements and do the proper planning. If you have any doubt then you can ask for support from the Blue Coat staff. The conditions should be agreed upon before you start implementing.

The functionality of this solution is one of the best, and it is leading the market.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The main use case of the solution was to deploy it as a proxy to access internet. In some cases it was an explicit proxy and in other cases it was implicit. We also explored the features of ADN to use caching and compression.

There were benefits but the evolution is slow, hence wanting to move on with the product. You can deploy the product in cloud but you can't automate it as the IP address can be assigned only after acquiring the serial number, hence you would not have a mechanism (by logging in/API) to apply the serial number beforehand so that the deployment can be automated.

Proxy Solution and ADN. Specifically its integration capability with Blue Coat director to apply seamless policy across all of Blue Coat. Also, it has intuitive proxy policy deployment using VPN. You can even forward-chain your proxy. Overall a good solution but growth requires automation support.

Automation for deployment of the device and pricing, which might be secondary considerations. The main consideration is deployment over multiple platforms and integration with SDN architecture.

No

No

Support for Blue Coat is good on the basic level problems. As the complexity increases, figure it out yourself as it appears that most engineers are not aware of their own products.

No. I used Blue Coat first but since it did not have the capabilities I was looking for I switched.

It was complex, especially in the VM environment. In the case of hardware, it was simple but you still you need to be aware of proxy deployment along with MACH5 deployment.

In-house. You can do it easily by yourself as the documentation is fairly good.

Some customers are adamant as they prefer Blue Coat as a vendor over others. They also provide free training, allowing you to learn a new technology.

Licensing is the major challenge whether manual or automated. Specifically, if you are using a VM edition, you need to be sure that you are using the specified amount of RAM and CPU cores or else you will not be allowed to configure it.

Yes. I did a test on Websense and also on Fortigate. I also did test on McAfee Web Security Gateway and Baracuda. 

None as of now.

• Granular security policy
• Ability to use as a Forward or Reverse Proxy
• ICAP integration, high performance SSL
• High performance web acceleration
• Integrates well with other vendors

The ProxySG allowed us to inspect full SSL traffic now without breaking a sweat. No more outages due to capacity, or DDoS.

Blue Coat advertises the ProxySG as a WAF, but it really isn’t. I would like the ProxySG to have full WAF features that will detect XSS, SQLi, CSFR, etc.

I've used it for over 10 years.

The policy is very complex, and their CPL code requires some time to learn it. Once it was inpProduction, no issues were encountered with the migration.

The ProxySG is a strong workhorse when compared to other proxy vendors.

We had a load balancer in front of the ProxySG’s. But for customers who do not have a load balancer, they may run into scalability issues.

Blue Touch support is top notch and very responsive when I opened service requests.

Their support engineers are very knowledgeable of the products. I never had to get my service request escalated because it was immediately solved every time.

We previously used Network Appliance NetCache proxies, but Blue Coat acquired the NetCache series and phased it out. We reviewed a NetCache replacement and it was determined the ProxySG was the better candidate for use.

It was somewhat complex at first, but was able to migrate successfully because of rigorous testing before going into production.

It was implemented in-house.

Blue Coat products are very expensive, but definitely worth a comparative analysis when choosing a proxy replacement. We looked at NetScaler, F5, and WebSense. Incorporating either one of those vendors required a full re-architecture of our front end which was not an option due to our complex network architecture.

Be sure to get the proper sized appliance, better to be over than undersized just in case of spikes in your network.

• URL Filtering


• 
  SSL Decryption


• 
  Application and Activity Filtering


• 
  Media Streaming Optimization

We were able to monitor users' social media behavior and control certain activities to be allowed on the social media. This helped to prevent data loss and other activities that could result in a negative impact to the organization.

URL Filtering provides both category filtering and customized filtering, which provides us with a lot of flexibility.

The GUI works, but could be better. It is 2015 and I don't want to be stuck in 1999. Just saying.

The anti-phishing attack features. It's very important feature in Eastern Europe to protect our users from phishing attacks by malicious web sources.

After implementation, there has been much less malicious actions from the internet and it has reduced the scope of APT attack vectors from the web.

They need to improve the intellectual analysis for APT vectors from web.

I've been using it for three years.

It's easily deployed, but it takes time for adjustment (like any other similar product).

It's a very stable product.

Great scalability.

6/10.

6/10.

It was our first full-scale enterprise solution.

It was a complex setup because we had to do custom adjustments, but the product is very flexible for that.

It was done in-house.

It offers unlimited count for licenses.

We specifically chose this product as it's the industry standard.

It's a great solution for high load enterprise infrastructure to protect company networks from web threats.