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WebMonitor 2015 from GFI

Editorial Type: Review     Date: 01-2015    Views: 2840      









GFI's WebMonitor 2015 is designed for businesses that need their web content security to be tougher and more effective than the average security appliance

With this latest version, GFI has gone back to the drawing board and completely redesigned the management interface to make it much more accessible. Its new 64-bit engine is faster and more scalable and it can provide access controls for all popular web applications. Policy creation has been simplified and GFI has streamlined the various WebMonitor versions into a single product, along with dual anti-virus engines as standard.

We installed WebMonitor 2015 on a Windows Server 2012 R2 server in a few minutes, but it can run just as easily on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 hosts. On first contact, the new interface fires up a quick start wizard to help choose a network proxy mode. The simple proxy mode needs one network port but requires your router to block all web traffic coming from the LAN so that it passes through the WebMonitor host. We chose the gateway mode which uses two network ports and doesn't require any router changes. It supports WPAD for automated client browser configuration.

GFI has put a lot of work into the new console as it's much slicker than previous versions. The home page provides a smart status overview, showing the most detected web applications and categories, bandwidth usage trends and the busiest users. The Dashboard view offers a wealth of information about web activity and it shows clearly which categories, web sites and users are consuming the most bandwidth. The Activity Dashboard reveals details on user surfing time, web requests and more, while the Real-Time view shows all the action as it happens.

You can drill down for more data as filters can be applied simply by clicking on a web site, category, or user in any of the dashboard views. Applied filters are displayed in a side bar to the right of the main view so they're easy to customise and the data shown can be quickly exported into PDF, Excel and Word formatted reports.

Policy creation is much easier than before as many operations are now drag and drop. During policy creation, all elements are displayed to the left and selected ones are dragged into the main window. Policies can be applied to everyone or specific local or Active Directory users, groups and IP addresses. You can set policies to block, allow, warn or monitor, and choose from over 80 URL categories for web filtering.

Default policies block malicious, vulnerable and phishing web sites where GFI performs URL scanning using the ThreatTrack service. Add file types to a policy and you can apply both virus scanning engines and show a download progress window to users.

GFI's application controls are particularly impressive as you can add up to fourteen categories to each policy ranging from social networking and media streaming to games and remote access. Access controls can be fine-tuned even further by selecting from a huge list of specific web apps where you can apply bandwidth quotas.

Separate URL filtering and logging policies can be applied to roaming workers with the Windows agent installed on their laptops. These come into play when they're on the road and all their activity logs are uploaded to the WebMonitor host upon reconnection.

GFI's WebMonitor 2015 is an excellent choice for businesses that demand the best web security but want to host it on their choice of hardware. It's very easy to deploy, the new management console is a pleasure to work with, and its policy based access controls are even more versatile than before. NC

Product: WebMonitor 2015
Supplier: GFI
Tel: +44 (0) 870 770 5370
Web site: www.gfi.com
Price: £13.33 per seat, per annum (3 year agreement and 100-249 seats)

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