M86 SWG 3000 v10

Our test appliance had the new Filter List installed which provides over fifty URL categories to block or allow. We found this just as effective as Websense and Proventia. With the games and gambling categories blocked, our test clients were unable to access these types of sites.

The appliance also handled social networking sites well, although the Filter List does place many under different categories. It would make things easier if M86 placed them all under a social networking category, or at least provided a search tool.

The M86 will have to go a long way to beat FaceTime's USG appliances which can control virtually any user activity you can imagine on the most popular social networks. M86’s options are far more basic, but you can use rules to stop certain user activities such as posting and uploading files to Facebook.

The appliance’s reporting facilities have always been very informative as it maintains its own database and provides plenty of details on user activity and security events. However, these are all predefined and can’t be customised.

The optional Security Reporter feature remedies this and is designed to provide a central location for reporting with greatly increased data retention periods. Data from all SWG appliances is automatically sent to this as archived files, which can then be used to create an impressive range of fully customisable reports.

For cloud-based scanning M86 uses Amazon’s EC2 (elastic cloud compute) service allowing multiple virtual scanning appliances to be used. This has been expanded to cover remote workers by deploying a SWSH (secure web services hybrid) agent to their laptops and PCs. It routes all web traffic to the nearest virtual scanner and v10 now includes an agent for Windows 7 systems.

The data leakage prevention feature scans a range of documents looking for keywords and phrases and blocks users from sending them. In previous tests we found that this couldn’t check simple text files, but the v10 release includes these and can also scan web form content.

During testing we found the SWG 3000 easy to deploy in the lab and capable of delivering tough web security measures. The active real time content inspection makes light work of spotting and removing malicious code. As most of this is carried out transparently, it can significantly reduce the burden on support departments.

So what's our verdict?