Why a Mid-Market Manufacturing Organization Replaced Forcepoint, Especially for Users in Restricted Regions

The trigger was a recurring complaint from a single group of users. The proxy was the problem. The destination wasn’t. The traffic was getting clipped at the edge of the vendor’s PoP coverage, and the engineers in that region had given up routing through it on bad days. This Forcepoint alternative case study is what happened when a mid-market manufacturing organization decided the proxy had to follow the user, not the other way around.

The customer is a mid-market manufacturing organization with operations across multiple APAC markets, including restricted regions where backhauled secure web gateways have traditionally struggled. They replaced Forcepoint with dope.security and got the SWG running across the workforce, including the users who had been silently working around the legacy proxy, inside the first month.

Quick read

• Industry: Manufacturing
• Replaced: Forcepoint
• Deployed: dope.SWG

Where things stood

Forcepoint had been in place long enough that nobody on the IT team was sure who first signed the contract. The complaints had piled up over time. The legacy console required specialist attention. The behavioral DLP layer threw alerts that took longer to triage than the underlying events were worth. Renewal quotes had grown every cycle. And the architectural problem the Principal Architect actually wanted to fix, traffic routing for users in restricted regions, had no path forward inside the existing product.

The brief was short. Inspect HTTPS without dragging every packet through a PoP that may or may not be reachable from the user’s network. Decommission the legacy DLP layer that wasn’t pulling its weight. Bring the cost down at the renewal, not up. And make the experience for users in restricted regions actually work, instead of nominally work.

Why an on-device proxy was the only architecture that fit

dope.security’s fly-direct architecture moves the proxy onto the endpoint. Web filtering, SSL inspection, and policy enforcement happen on the device. There’s no cloud PoP to route through, no backhaul, and no dependency on a vendor data center being reachable from the user’s region.

For a manufacturing workforce that spans multiple APAC markets, that meant the SWG worked the same in every market, including the ones where backhauled SWGs traditionally fail. There was no PoP map to reason about. There was no escalation path that ended in “the vendor’s regional capacity isn’t great this quarter.” The proxy was on the laptop. The traffic went out from the laptop. That was the architecture.

The Principal Architect ran the migration with a partner. Policy was authored in the dope.console and pushed to endpoints in minutes. The Forcepoint client was decommissioned by org unit. The whole sequence ran inside the first month, not the multi-quarter migration enterprise renewals tend to assume.

“Forcepoint worked for our users in headquarters and stopped working anywhere the PoP map had a soft spot. We moved to dope.security and the architecture problem disappeared, because there wasn’t a PoP map anymore. The engineers in the difficult regions stopped filing tickets, which is the metric I care about.”

— Principal Architect, a mid-market manufacturing organization

The non-technical reason

Architecture and price got dope.security shortlisted. The 24/7 white glove global support team got it across the line.

A manufacturing IT team running a multi-region workforce takes tickets at every hour. The Principal Architect had been burned by enterprise vendor support before. Tickets that lived for weeks. Tier-1 reps who hadn’t read the case before joining the call. With dope.security, the customer was on a first-name basis with the support engineers inside the first month, and the questions that used to live in a ticket queue came back as same-day answers. That part wasn’t in the spreadsheet, but it was in the renewal decision.

What changed

Inside the first month, the team had SSL inspection running across every managed endpoint, on or off the corporate network, in every region. The legacy Forcepoint tenant was decommissioned. The user experience in restricted regions improved instead of degraded. The Principal Architect had a clean answer when the auditor asked about HTTPS visibility, and a real reduction against the previous renewal quote.

The architect’s read on the project was simple. The proxy followed the user, the math worked, and the engineers in the difficult regions stopped filing tickets.

FAQ

Why do manufacturing organizations replace Forcepoint? The most common reasons we hear are backhaul latency and reachability for users in restricted regions, a behavioral DLP layer that’s heavier than the security value it produces, a console that needs specialist attention, and renewal quotes that grow every cycle. An on-device SWG removes the backhaul, simplifies the console, and reshapes the spend.

Does dope.security work for users in regions where backhauled SWGs struggle, including restricted markets? The proxy runs on the endpoint, so there’s no PoP map to depend on and no traffic detour through another region. The same policy and inspection behavior apply wherever the laptop is, including markets where backhauled SWGs have traditionally been unreliable.

How fast is a Forcepoint-to-dope.security migration? Most migrations measure rollout in weeks, not quarters. The dope.security agent deploys via the existing endpoint management tool, the policy moves into dope.console, and the Forcepoint client is decommissioned by org unit. There’s no PoP architecture to stand up first, which is the part of the equivalent rollout that takes the longest.

About dope.security

dope.security, the Distributed On-device Proxy Endpoint, is the preferred security vendor of security leaders ranging from SMBs and Midsize companies, to Fortune 500’s, to world’s leading VC and PE firms Deployed across 83 countries, dope.security is securing web, data, and AI traffic around the world on its patented fly-direct architecture.