The Anchiva 206 Web Gateway enforces web surfing policies and protects against web- and email-borne threats. This product features an onboard threat database that prevents more than five million web- and email-borne spyware, viruses, adware and other types of malware, including trojans, backdoors and rootkits. Additionally, this appliance can be used to manage application control, such as IM and peer-to-peer.
We found this tool to be quite easy to setup and manage. The initial configuration takes just a few minutes and is all done through the web interface. This configuration sets up an initial scanning policy, as well as network connections. Once the initial configuration is complete the appliance can be placed inline between the firewall and a network switch where it will begin to monitor network traffic. We found the web GUI to be easy and intuitive to navigate, and policy setup to be simple to do as well.
This appliance offers a great amount of flexibility when it comes to assigning groups and users to policies. Security profiles can be created to provide granular control of security groups, security blacklists and Active Directory objects. This granularity - combined with an anti-malware engine that can scan protocols, such as HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP and POP3 - makes this product a solid anti-malware gateway. We did find configuring security profiles to be a little confusing at first, however.
Documentation includes a short quick-start guide and a PDF administrator guide. The quick-start guide provides clear and easy-to-follow initial setup instructions, while the administrator guide details in great depth the product functions and advanced configuration. Both guides include many screen shots and diagrams as well.
Anchiva provides eight hours a day/five days a week phone and email technical support, as well as access to an online support area at a cost of 10 percent of the system cost per year. The appliance also comes with a one year hardware warranty that is included in the purchase price.
At a price of $3,600, we find this product to be a good value for the money. The Anchiva appliance provides solid scanning and granular policy control and is easy to manage.
