We currently are in the process moving over our older network architecture to a newer network architecture. This was our favorite cloud based solution we looked at with what we deemed the best mix of price and features.

It is all cloud based. No on-site equipment it required. The user interface is very easy to use. There are a substantial amount of pre-built reports to analyze all the data this system collects.

If using Azure AD for user identification, you must have an Azure AD premium subscription.

Bluecoat advanced web and cloud security provide protection against web and network-based threats with cloud data protection. The product gives an organization full visibility over web, cloud, and mobile networks. They deliver on-premise appliances as well as cloud services and also as a hybrid of those two technologies which provides flexibility to choose the right product for an organization.

Bluecoat has a simple administration console that is easy to manage and makes administrator's life easy also pre-built reports are very useful for monitoring and identification of web traffic. URL blocking and whitelisting features are simple, but accuracy is very much higher. Since bluecoat has cloud versions we have the freedom to move for Saas version if we don’t won’t on-premise appliances.

We were facing some challenges with on-premise appliances when integrating with SIEM. Syslogs doesn’t have web traffic information and we had to transfer raw log files using the file transfer method to SIEM. Obtaining vendor support for solving issues is a bit challenging and takes time.

I used to like Bluecoat more before Symantec and Broadcom, in my opinion the new mergers didn't add any value

Content filtering is my most favorite, smart URL categories covering most websites today. blocking mechanism is really effective and it simply works.

i didn't like how bandwidth management behaved. I think it caused a bottleneck and bandwidth problems. however this also applies to many other competitors when implementing traffic shaping. I also wasn't happy with the renewal offers in my country, renewal fees are a bit over priced.

The UI for the Blue Coat application was extremely easy to work with. I was able to setup policy, decide what traffic I wanted to analyze on the network, and then get everything going within 1-2 hours.

There is a VPN/endpoint software you can utilize for remote workstations/laptops. This would often slow down network traffic significantly. If they can clean up the unified agent, this product would be really good.

I mostly liked the flexibility and the transparency of the server/services. Since the product provides 100% transparency, the end user is not affected at all, it provides a high level of security supporting the most recent technologies.

The products often have weird limitations with no reason for years, despite it does the job, some advanced networking features are required for more advanced networks.

I explored this option but on prem appliance gives better results in this case.

You can use this cloud solution to escalate your security solution fairly fast

The price is high for each endpoint and you have to renew it every year. Also you need to rely on you ISP to guarantee good communication