Cascadia Labs URL Filtering and Web Security

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COMPARATIVE REVIEW
Cascadia Labs URL Filtering and Web SecurityResults from Q4 2008
Executive Summary Chart 1 - Overall Blocking Effectiveness (Weighted Average)Companies rely on URL filtering and Web security products to protect 100%their employees, PCs, and networks 90%from dangerous, inappropriate, and 80%unwanted content on the Web. In 70%addition to blocking Web pages that 70% 64%contain sexually explicit, violent, or 60% 59% 58% 60% 59%illegal content, these products also 50%play an increasingly important role in 40%securing corporate networks - they can 30%provide a first line of defense against malicious Web pages and restrict 20%bandwidth-hogging downloads. 10%While filtering of adult-oriented and 0%productivity-wasting sites is something Trend Micro Websense SurfControl Blue Coat McAfee IronPortof a commodity, there are notable differences in how individual products perform against more challenging weighted overall score of 70 percent, shows that all of them block a great types of Web content, and a large while the second-ranked product, the majority of Adult and Productivity & variation when it comes to blocking McAfee Web Security Appliance 3300 Recreation URLs, and that all of them security threats. with Enhanced URL Filtering Database, also fare adequately - though with earned 64 percent. In addition to some room for improvement - in the Cascadia Labs regularly tests posting the highest score overall, Trend Bandwidth Usage, Communications, the effectiveness of URL filtering Micro also ranked first at blocking URLs and Liability groups. products using URLs selected from pointing at security threats. its independent, living corpus of more than 1.5 million categorized Blocking substantial Trend Micro SurfControl McAfeeWeb pages. We test products' ability numbers of URLs that lead Websense Blue Coat IronPortto block content in 22 specific to security threats, in fact, categories within six broad groups clearly differentiates the 100%of primarily English-language pages: leading products from the 90%Security, Adult, Bandwidth Usage, rest, as shown in Chart 2. 80%Communications, Liability, and URL filtering products that Productivity & Recreation. include effective Web security 70%capabilities can provide a first 60% 53%In our December 2008 Web Security line of defense to help protect 50%Tests of six market-leading URL filtering users and companies from 40% 42%and Web security products, including malicious content. Security 31%30% 23%both perimeter appliances and server aside, URL filtering products 20% 20%software, Trend Micro emerged as also serve an important 10% 9%the clear winner. As shown in Chart 1, function in enforcing Trend Micro's InterScan Web Security companies' broader Web 0% Security URLsgateway solution (IWSA) earned a usage policies. Our testing
1We derived the overall results by . IronPort Web Security Appliance results and specific insights about applying weights to raw blocking S650 v5.6.0-626 (database versions product behavior.results that represent what we believe 2170-2173)to be the relative priorities of typical Traditionally, products have blocked enterprise customers. Cascadia Labs re- Trend Micro's IWSA relies on an in- URLs using local databases which are evaluates this weighting on a quarterly the-cloud database, so it has access updated frequently by the vendors. basis, and over the last few years, to ratings for URLs as soon as they are In recent years, more products have security has continued to increase in posted on Trend Micro's servers, rather added remote database lookup, importance; for this quarter's testing, than waiting for a periodic update to often described as in-the-cloud or the Security group contributes 30 the appliance's local database. Trend Security as a Service (SaaS) protection, percent to our overall scores. Adult Micro, McAfee, Blue Coat, and IronPort to provide more timely responses counts for 20 percent; Bandwidth also incorporate Web reputation to a fast-changing Web. Products Usage, 15 percent; Liability, 15 percent; capabilities. Since Web reputation is have also added Web reputation and Communications, 10 percent; and targeted primarily against security real-time categorization capabilities Productivity & Recreation, 10 percent. URLs, we only enable it for that group's to complement database-driven (Because Trend Micro's eff... [download for more]