Sophos have just launched the WS 1000, branded, “the industry's first web control platform designed to provide trusted content security, application control and URL filtering in a single appliance”.

Well good for them.

I like appliances as they give me confidence that software doesn’t. Basically if I don’t like a piece of hardware I can [relatively] easily remove it and get back to normality.

Ever tried doing that with software? With the thousands of components making up your average piece of medium-enterprise business software nowadays it can be a bit of a nightmare, even if you install and uninstall it using the “proper” installation tools.

Sophos have rather smartly teamed up with SurfControl to get access to that company’s rather neat URL classification engine providing them with intelligence on stacks of web pages throughout he internet.

I guess questions remain as to the scalability of the appliance. Sophos are positioning it for the mid market, so I guess are hedging their bets a bit. Only time will tell.

If web borne threat management is your gig give this product a try. I’d love to know how it performs.