EXCLUSIVE: Clearswift MIMEsweeper Web Appliance ENW10

The use of IM in the workplace is a concern but we found it easy enough to create a policy that allows IM chatter through in both directions but still blocked viruses and spyware, stopped specific file types and sizes being uploaded or downloaded and made sure that tracking cookies were removed.

For URL filtering you can send a warning web page to users that try to access any sites blocked within the policies assigned to their system. Each page can be fully customised with features such as your own company logo and advisory text. For each policy you can decide who should be notified and this is where Informs come in, as these define a single email address or specify the system administrator and policies can contain multiple Informs.

You can keep track of all the action from the Report Centre which provides plenty of predefined reports and these can be easily customised and exported to PDF or CSV format, or emailed to a selected user. A clever feature is that Clearswift hosts the on-line help files allowing it to see which pages are most frequently accessed and consequently which areas of the appliance are giving the most grief.

Filtering rules are designed to be easy to create and selecting a policy route produces a slick flowchart beneath showing what is occurring and in what order. It even has the option to present policy flowcharts in a printable format.

Appliance configuration is handled at the System Centre which offers a smart health page with graphs on system utilisation, threat rates and bandwidth usage along with the status of all automatic updates to the anti-virus and anti-spyware engines and URL database. Task deployment can be managed at the User Centre as you can provide extra login details to other staff and allow them to view and create reports and possibly set up policy definitions.

During testing we found the ENW10 easy enough to deploy although it really does need to have Active Directory support to allow it to apply policies to users and groups and well as systems. Other than that we were impressed with the appliance, as policy-based security makes it extremely versatile and the smart management interface is a pleasure to work with.