ASA and Websense

[Brian O'Flynn]

Hi, I have recently deployed a wireless solution behind a cisco ASA firewall and have now been asked to introduce a web filtering product to compliment the solution.  I would like to take advantage of the URL redirect feature of the ASA to send requests to a WebSense server.  I have not used WebSense however and have a few questions that I am hoping someone can help:

1) When you redirect URL requests to the WebSense, can you enforce that an AUP gets displayed once a week which must be agreed to before proceeding?

2) I will have some Guest Users and some AD Users, is it possible to enforce one policy for the guest users based on IP Subnet and a second policy for AD Users based on userid?

Cheers

Brian

[trippi · Accepted solution]

The first one I am not sure about, that is a question for Websense.

The second question, yes, that is possible in Websense configuration also.

[Brian O'Flynn]

Thanks for the feedback Trippi, I will redirect the first question to websense.

Cheers

Brian

[Brian O'Flynn]

Just a follow on question from that, is there any reason to choose WebSense over SmartFilter?  Don't really see much difference between them.

[trippi]

It depends on what your goal is.

If it is to provide basic URL filtering, probably not.

You can even use Squid, which is free to provide a limited, whitelisted only filter.

If you are going for Security, yes, there is a difference.

The majority being in the back end URL fitlering database, the ability to decrypt SSL, real time classification, AV scanning, etc.

If you use Websense and the ASA integration you won't have the ability to decrypt SSL.

If you use the Websense Securtiy Gateway you can, along with the other major competitors.

You can use WCCP to accomplish this transparently in your network device (core switch, firewall, etc)

If you go the latter route, budget permitting,  I suggest looking at all the vendors in the top right corner of the Gartner Magic Quadrant

Attached is the latest magic quadrant for Secure Web Gateway.