A strong feature set makes the Secure Internet Gateway 3000 a heavy hitter in any organization’s architecture. The Secure Internet Gateway provides anti-virus scanning against all protocols and anti-spyware scanning blocks potentially harmful spyware, cookies and adware from entering onto the network. To protect against spam, the Secure Internet Gateway uses an anti-spam engine consisting of anti-spam, anti-phishing rule sets, permit or deny lists, and a spam learning feature. The Secure Internet Gateway enforces policy and compliance issues regarding outgoing data transmission, as well as some forms of data leakage. This appliance is easily configurable by IT staff and, once configured, requires minimal administrator intervention.
This product is fairly simple to setup and manage. The deployment begins with an easy to follow setup wizard that gathers information about the basic environment through the web interface. Once the wizard is complete, the appliance reboots and further configuration is continued through a web GUI. The web GUI is quite cumbersome and takes time to get accustomed to.
The Secure Internet Gateway can integrate with existing Active Directory groups and users to create specific and granular policies. However, we found policy and rule configuration to be confusing and awkward due to their high granularity.
The documentation that accompanies this appliance is in-depth and complete. The step-by-step administrative instructions were easy to understand and explain clearly what is required to have a successful deployment of the device. The table of contents is hot linked for easy information retrieval.
McAfee offers tiered levels of support with this product, including gold, gold select, platinum and platinum select service packages. For example, the gold support offering includes 24/7 phone support, DAT and engine updates, product updates and access to online tools, a knowledge base, a technical support service portal, and a global solutions lab.
At a price of $2,395, this product is an average value for the money. Though it takes some time to get to know how to use the appliance, it does offer some excellent flexibility and some very nice features.
