Clearswift MIMEsweeper Web Appliance CSW250

The filtering rules use easily recognisable icons, and selecting a policy route produces a slick flowchart beneath, making it easy to see what's occurring and in what order. Note that policy scheduling also won't be supported until the next OS release. When users try to access a banned web page, you can thrust a warning web page at them that's specific to the category classification. Furthermore, these can be customised with features such as your company logo and advisory text. As the name implies, Informs are used to define who should be notified when a rule has been triggered, and each can contain a single email address.

The Report Center provides a pile of predefined reports on areas such as the most popular websites, the number of document downloads and viral activity. These can be easily customised, allowing you to create your own threat reports or see how much bandwidth certain systems are consuming.

As with Clearswift's mail security appliance, we found the MIMEsweeper for Web solution easy to deploy and use. The current lack of AD integration and policy scheduling are drawbacks, but this web-content security solution is still versatile and compares favourably on price and annual subscription charges with its competition.

Author: Dave Mitchell