We performed a comparison between Barracuda Web Security and Filtering and Cisco Secure Email based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks and others in Secure Web Gateways (SWG)."The protection offered by the product is the most valuable feature. It detects vulnerabilities or traps on our users' phones and then prompts them to clean up their devices. Tools we used previously would only discover, which required us to gather information on the backend, so Lookout is a welcome upgrade."
"The solution is stable."
"On the outside, the main differentiation is because Lookout ingest. They have ingested basically all of the apps for the last ten years and all the versions of all the apps, and we have that in a corporate database that allows us to do very large-scale machine learning and analysis on that data set. That's not something that any of the competitors really have the capability to do because they don't have access to the data set. A lot of the apps you can no longer get them because that version of the app is five or six years old, and it just doesn't exist anywhere anymore, except within our infrastructure. So, the ability to have that very rich dataset and learn from that dataset is a real differentiator."
"The most valuable features are the antivirus as a whole, the anti-malware, and all of the protection features that scan our enterprise devices."
"The support is fantastic."
"The most valuable features are Barracuda's policies for filtering various websites according to the organization's policies and blocking traffic for any P2P application like torrents."
"It is straightforward to deploy and manage."
"I like that it does a lot of malicious content and is easy to manage. There are a lot of checkboxes, and you can add your own URLs or get it preconfigured."
"I have found the most valuable the ability to have insight into our web traffic and control its flow."
"The ease of use. It's pretty easy to use and navigate the UI... to either block or whitelist a web address."
"The solution is very simple to use and implement."
"It is a user-friendly product."
"The filtering is definitely better at catching both spam and malicious messages, and there's a lot of extremely granular ability for setting up rules. You can do it the way you want to. The Microsoft solution tends to be pretty limited in how it allows some of that to be done."
"This solution provides some benefits, like comfortable access to TAC support. You get prompt support when working directly with Cisco."
"It has the IMS engine, Intelligent Multi-Scan engine, and it does a good job, right out-of-the-box, of blocking the vast majority of things that should be blocked."
"It's flexible. There are a lot of rules and policies that can be easily applied for certain employees or certain mailboxes."
"The added value of it is that every migration to a new version is initiated by the Cisco version itself, so that is a bunch of work that you don't have to do on the Cisco ESA system on-premise. As it becomes a safe platform, you don't need to invest anything in your own data center or in your upgrade path."
"The advanced phishing protection and the integration with the awareness tool that Cisco has embedded into the solution to bring awareness to the customers about the dangers of phishing attacks and other things that come from email are the most valuable features."
"The most significant enhancement we've gained is in terms of security through the upgrade we received."
"From the analysis that we've done, they do seem to be maybe a step behind in trying to enter the market with a new solution. But when they do pick up, they do come out with some good products."
"The stability depends on the service from where you access it. Because sometimes, the place you are in, you have Gateway. You don't have Gateway. The gateway is overutilized. At the end, you need to go through their gateways. And this is the key point here. You have a tracking point. If it's not well orchestrated, and it scales up as you add more to the existing team, you will suffer"
"Lookout was moving into the SSE space. And so their work on SecureWeb Gateway and SD-WAN is still sort of evolving."
"We just submitted an enhancement request reflecting the main area we want to see improvement in; the APIs. Currently, we're able to build dashboards, but it's somewhat backward because we use our MDM API to create them. Lookout should provide API to customers so we can query our data and use it in our cloud, and this is the only outstanding area for improvement with the product right now."
"The price could be better."
"Considering other tier-one applications, like Next-Generation Firewall, they also have web security in-built within their appliances or applications. Barracuda is still lagging behind in features like that, so they need to update if they want to be in the top spot."
"The AD agent is an issue which my customers and I have encountered. Sometimes it refuses to start and, only as time goes by, does it become apparent that things are not working the way they should."
"Barracuda products are cheap."
"Our problem is that it's a virtual appliance and we're moving to a new platform and, for whatever reason, we can't move it as it is... When we were migrating our virtual machines from the old to the new system, we determined rather quickly that it wouldn't migrate over."
"The solution’s customer support should be improved."
"Considering other tier-one applications, like Next-Generation Firewall, they also have web security in-built within their appliances or applications. Barracuda is still lagging behind in features like that, so they need to update if they want to be in the top spot."
"It doesn't allow adding DNS filtering for off-site clients."
"Typically, in a phishing email, they try to use a name everybody's going to recognize, like the CEO's name or the CFO's name... With this appliance, the way it's designed at the moment, for us to really stop that with any level of confidence, we have to build a dictionary of all the names of the people we want it to check, and all the ways they could be spelled. My name would be in there as Phillip Collins, Phillip D. Collins, Phillip Dean Collins, Phil Collins, Phil D. Collins. There could be eight or 10 variations of my name that we'd have to put in the dictionary. There's no artificial intelligence to say "Phil Collins" could be all these other things, and to stop phishing from coming through in that way."
"It would be nice to have an easier way to check on the health of the system, how stressed these appliances are. Sure, you can do it, but it would be helpful to have an easier way to do it, maybe even at a glance."
"In future releases, I would like to see two main improvements come to mind. First, the current solution requires maintaining two separate operating systems for FTD, which can be cumbersome. I'd love to see a single operating system for the FTD box."
"The Forged Email Detection feature needs improvement, particularly with domain. The sensors are not that good and the rules sets are unclear."
"We cannot manage multiple devices from a single UI."
"My opinion on the licensing of this solution is that it is a mess that needs sorting out. I am not particularly bothered by pricing as I administer it and make recommendations for people to buy or not to buy."
"The product's GUI for the dashboard needs improvement."
"If you are not a technical guy, it is hard to maneuver, but as soon as you work on it, it gets better and better. If there was a better way to know how to do things or how to find things, it would be good."
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Barracuda Web Security and Filtering is ranked 21st in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 5 reviews while Cisco Secure Email is ranked 2nd in Email Security with 26 reviews. Barracuda Web Security and Filtering is rated 7.6, while Cisco Secure Email is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Barracuda Web Security and Filtering writes "It comes with useful policy creation features but needs to improve its outdated tech and poor support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Secure Email writes "The amount of traffic that it stops is massive". Barracuda Web Security and Filtering is most compared with Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway, TitanHQ WebTitan and SonicWall CFS, whereas Cisco Secure Email is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Trellix Collaboration Security, Fortinet FortiMail and Proofpoint Email Protection.
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