Optenet WebSecure

The WebSecure appliance from Optenet offers a multitude of deployment modes for the enterprise, including proxy, bridge, sniffer, ICAP and gateway or router deployment. This appliance features the Kaspersky Lab anti-virus engine to protect the environment from phishing and malware before they come into the environment.

Our appliance arrived pretty much ready to go. The initial setup involved connecting to the appliance via the web GUI to customize the IP and network settings. The web-based interface was quite simple to navigate, but it did take us a few minutes to understand how policies were configured and applied.

We did find, however, that this appliance comes preloaded with a ton of preconfigured policies, including a somewhat overly tight "No Distractions" policy. While we are all for preconfigured policy to help create a starting point, we found this one to block sites that may not necessarily be distractions, such as MSN, Microsoft's portal. With that said, this appliance does have several other great functions, such as application control that can block IM, P2P, remote access and several other application protocols.

Documentation included a short deployment guide and a much more in-depth administrator guide.
At a price of $10,200 per year for 1,000 users, this product is quite expensive, especially considering you are only paying to lease the hardware. We find this product to be an average value for the money. While it does have some nice features, it can become quite costly as an ongoing charge.