Skyhigh Security Service Edge (SSE)

At our company, we mainly use Skyhigh Security  as a secure web gateway proxy.

We use Skyhigh Security for web filtering and whitelisting, blacklisting websites, and general web traffic filtering, mainly for HTTP and HTTPS traffic.

Skyhigh Security has all the mainstream features available in the market and offers both hardware and cloud usability. The hardware and cloud usability features help my team by providing easy scalability, which is the main advantage, and it is beneficial to have both options as there has been a shift from hardware to cloud traffic.

Skyhigh Security has positively impacted our organization by helping us secure our network better, secure our HTTP traffic, and assist in compliance with GDPR and HIPAA requirements, especially since we are a health-based company.

Skyhigh Security needs UI improvement, as its user interface is confusing and requires an expert analyst to spend considerable time becoming familiar with it.

Recently, while decommissioning some old Skyhigh hardware, I found that it does not have a CLI command for secure wipe, so we had to manually perform the wipe from a hardware perspective, which takes too much time compared to similar devices like IPS sensors that do have secure wipe commands.

I chose a rating of 8 out of 10 because Skyhigh Security has all the mainstream features that other proxies or secure web gateways have, but its hardware needs refinement and fine-tuning, and its user interface also needs improvement.

I have been using Skyhigh Security  for two years.

Skyhigh Security is deployed in my organization on-premises. As a managed security service provider, we purchase Skyhigh Security directly from the vendor. Skyhigh Security is a good product and a decent option based on other products available in the market. I gave this product a rating of 8 out of 10.

My main use cases for Skyhigh Security  were securing internet access for people working remotely before the COVID pandemic, and helping prevent data loss through people uploading files and sensitive information to web-based services and online storage drives.

A specific example of a scenario where I used Skyhigh Security  for one of these use cases is when the agent was installed on all of our laptops. This meant that even when we were working from home and not on the VPN, whenever we were browsing the web, all of the content that we were seeing and all of the URLs we were trying to visit were going through the cloud instances of the Skyhigh Security scanners to ensure we did not go to prohibited websites and that there were no malicious files downloaded to our laptops.

Skyhigh Security worked reasonably well, I very rarely had issues, and their uptime was good enough that we did not experience any outages.

The best features that Skyhigh Security offers are their newer Zero Trust access so that you do not need VPNs and you can access your files from anywhere without having to go through a lot of configuration by the end user.

The Zero Trust feature specifically helped my team or organization before we thought about putting sensitive information onto SharePoint  in the cloud, so we wanted all of the sensitive information on-premise. By going through their Zero Trust interface, we effectively had single sign-on to the internal network remotely without a VPN, so it reduced the overhead and gave us faster access to the files.

Skyhigh Security positively impacted my organization by allowing us to get rid of the VPNs, which reduced the overhead for IT, and it meant we did not need as many licenses for the VPN software for all of the laptops. With the vast majority working remotely, this was a significant cost saving.

Skyhigh Security can be improved, and the biggest problem they have is that they are still owned by private equity, which is a massive drain on them financially because of the debt burden that they share with their sister company, Trellix. They need to somehow get out from under that private equity or get a better investment model so that they do not keep losing experienced staff without being able to replace them.

Most of what I have heard is related to the business side, and from the feedback I have received from people I know that still work there, when they are allowed to focus on delivery, they are still able to deliver. However, the lack of staffing is slowing down their ability to innovate and push features out that customers may want.

I have used Skyhigh Security for an extended period.

Skyhigh Security is stable; they do have scheduled downtimes, as most offerings do, but they have multi-tenancy and multi-locations. If your primary location is down, you just get diverted to the other one. Around 14 years ago, there were problems with stability on Skyhigh Security products when they were part of McAfee and Intel, but they addressed those problems by about 2014, so since then, everything has been good.

Skyhigh Security's scalability is good, as their cloud auto-scales. They have peering agreements with a lot of the major ISPs where their data centers are, which allows them to get a really good bandwidth allocation. Because they dynamically scale, I did not experience them becoming overloaded and causing lag.

Customer support has been at times mixed; however, I think it has improved. They had a reasonable amount of staff turnover as a result of all of the structural changes that the company went through. Last I heard, it is a lot better than it was, and they have some really technical people in there. If there is a complex problem that needs to be worked through, when it reaches the right people, they are very good and able to get through it. There is also some really good diagnostic information built into their web gateways that they deploy on-premise if you want to do hybrid, so they get a lot of information before you even know something might be wrong.

Skyhigh Security was the one we used and we did not previously use a different solution.

Before choosing Skyhigh Security, we did not evaluate other options because we were a sister company, so we had no choice.

Skyhigh Security is deployed in my organization in a hybrid cloud setup.

My company does not have a business relationship with Skyhigh Security other than being a customer; we were a sister company, both owned by the same private equity.

I have seen a return on investment, and while I cannot share specific metrics, there are fewer gateways needed to be deployed on-premise. I suspect we would have lost one or two heads in our IT support team or IT deployment team, though I do not know for definite. I do know that by moving to having more in the cloud, their cloud is automatically updated as part of a SaaS solution, which reduces the responsibility on the company to do the updates themselves. Their support system worked reasonably well, and because there were not many problems with their agent on the laptops, we did not need a great deal internally to manage that.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it was not too bad. I do not know the figures, but it was not as painful as it could have been, and I think it was reasonable. I was not involved in the negotiations because they can always be painful.

Skyhigh Security deserves an eight out of ten rating because they are one of the better companies in the web security business that are focused primarily on hosting in the cloud rather than putting a lot of infrastructure onto a client's site. They are getting decent reviews within the standard competitive analysis areas; however, they cannot implement at the rate they need to, which is what brings them down to an eight.

Skyhigh Security can be improved, and the biggest problem they have is that they are still owned by private equity, which is a massive drain on them financially because of the debt burden that they share with their sister company, Trellix. They need to somehow get out from under that private equity or get a better investment model so that they do not keep losing experienced staff without being able to replace them.

Most of what I have heard is related to the business side, and from the feedback I have received from people I know that still work there, when they are allowed to focus on delivery, they are still able to deliver. However, the lack of staffing is slowing down their ability to innovate and push features out that customers may want.

My advice to others looking into using Skyhigh Security is to seriously consider it because they have some really good features and excellent data residency options. You can choose which location you want your filtering to be done in if you are using their cloud solution, which means if you are in Europe, you can choose to use the European data centers rather than the US ones. This provides reduced latency, and your data remains inside the EU, making it a really valuable feature. I believe they are competitive feature-wise with all the others in the market.

I find the browsing feature security in Skyhigh Security  most valuable; we mainly used it for Forward Proxy.

Skyhigh Security's analytics were providing decent information with respect to top usage, user-wise, and device-wise, and if there are any blacklisted websites being accessed, we used to get notifications, which was helpful.

I think the technical support from Skyhigh Security needs room for improvement; I would give it a six out of 10.

They should improve the overall competence of their technical support; the response is good, but it takes time for the engineer to understand the issues.

I think a single pane of glass wherein you can quickly see what is happening would be an additional feature to make Skyhigh Security better.

I had been using Skyhigh Security for three years.

I did not face any issues with Skyhigh Security; we later moved to Microsoft Defender for Identity  and other solutions, but we find this piece of Skyhigh Security quite good, so we will continue to use that and we never used Identity.

Skyhigh Security is scalable; there is no doubt about that.

We did not utilize the Identity and Access Management  features from Skyhigh Security; this is the first time I am hearing that Skyhigh Security provides protection on identity and security.

The initial setup of Skyhigh Security was complicated; we were trying to move to the cloud and faced challenges, such as troubleshooting and live web analysis, which was very difficult.

I am not sure about the pricing of Skyhigh Security, as the licensing piece is taken care of by another department, so I am not really sure about that.

I cannot really do a comparison between Skyhigh Security and Microsoft Defender, as Microsoft Defender does not have this Forward Proxy.

We did not use the Threat Protection feature in Skyhigh Security; we purely used it for Forward Proxy.

Regarding Data Loss Prevention capabilities in Skyhigh Security, I have not used that feature.

I would rate this review a 7 out of 10.