Before this, we really didn't have a comprehensive email solution. We were simply using the antivirus on the machines. We didn't have anything to stop it from ever getting in, in the first place. Comparing it to other products I used before I came to this company, just about four years ago, it's done much better than any other product I've ever used.

I don't have any way to compare it to anything my current company had before because it didn't have much of anything before. When I came in, that was one of the tasks I was given —securing the email — along with moving us to Office 365. The company had been hit with ransomware before I got here. It had that experience of being attacked and being caught with ransomware, and it didn't have an IT department before I got there. I was the IT department for the first year. We've grown tremendously since then.

Cisco Secure Email hasn't helped clients consolidate any applications. In Portugal, there's no business for that because what you usually do is implement several solutions that are regarded as the better solutions in terms of the market. In some cases, it could be Cisco, and in other cases, it could be another player. At S21sec, we try to give a better solution to customers and adapt and customize it to the specific needs of our customers.

The main difference between Cisco Secure Email and other solutions is the reliability and the capability to offline the email if there are some problems on the customer side. We can also overcome problems that may arise in terms of the local telecommunication operators that handle the communication. If there's a failure there, we can overcome those problems with the relays from the Cisco solution.

Prior to using Cisco Secure Email Cloud Gateway and my being at the organization, they had a Qbot massive issue. I don't know a lot of the detail, but at the time, we had a lot of machines that had to run certain versions of software. Because of it being older software, legacy-type applications, they were more susceptible to issues. Qbot just went through the organization and took out a lot of that equipment/machines. Cisco actually came in and assisted to get rid of all the issues that we saw with Qbot, etc. It took several weeks spent by Cisco and other organizations trying to resolve our issues with Qbot to get things operational and back to normal. That was really the catalyst to get Cisco Email Secuity into the organization.

We were previously using McAfee for both their Endpoint Protection as well as for Email Servers. The difference was the volume of emails hitting our email servers. The servers had to deal with 10 million emails a month. Having to process those additional emails and pushing them onto users took a massive amount of infrastructure and resources at a server level. Whereas, at the moment, our servers are not having to deal with that because we have Cisco Secure Email Cloud Gateway right outside of our perimeter.

One of the reasons that we switched away from McAfee is that we moved to an enterprise agreement with Cisco. Under that, we get the Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) for Endpoints. Once we went down that path and install it, there was no point in having McAfee as well when the AMP for Endpoints already has some of the different engines. Plus, there was a duplication of costs and applications, such as the support costs as well as to maintain multiple antivirus and endpoint protection software.

At my previous organization, we were using the standard Office 365 controls and Email Gateway before we put in CES. The amount of email and spam that we got, even malicious emails, through Microsoft was horrendous. We ended up having four different massive outages because of getting some viruses in the organization and some of our file servers along with encrypted user hard drives. We had four instances of major outages where we were down for probably 24 hours each time, and that was only because we had the backups. We also had some other measures where as soon as we saw any change in the root directory (as that data encrypts our file shares), we'd automatically shut the services down. However, this was an inconvenience for the users. You would end up getting the initial malware, then also having to do remediation to get it back to normal. When you have potentially hundreds of staff who are offline for 24 hours, it's a very big cost to the organization when you don't have your systems up and running. 

When the malware got through Office 365 on four different instances, that was directly attributable to the difference between Office 365 and CES. Our users still had to get their email through our on-prem server, but we did not let staff get their emails directly from the Microsoft 365 Server.

Once we put in CES, these issues disappeared altogether, and we were thankful that the volume of spam emails decreased considerably. Office 365 is a good second check to CES, but there's nothing that I've ever seen which has gotten through Cisco Secure Email Cloud Gateway that Office 365 has picked up.

We and our customers use a variety of different firewall manufacturers, not just Cisco. And as with all vendors, some have better properties or better features than others. Cisco Firewalls for Firepower had to use the centralized management system, FMC, but where some customers prefer just an On-Box GUI to configure the device, Cisco was playing catch up with other vendors who were operating in that same area. But what we found is that with later versions of Firepower and also FDM which is the On-Box management, those features have now come leaps and bounds. They are now on par with the centralized FMC to the FDM, allowing customers an easier way to deploy these products not only on-premise but also in the cloud.

It was the IronPort before Cisco acquired it in 2007. It is the same appliance and software. This solution has been upgraded by several versions, but it is basically the same, they just changed the name. 

We have used Sophos and Mimecast before in our company.

It has always been ESA from the onset.

In previous organizations, we've leveraged Postini, which was a cloud-based solution that was acquired by Google. I've also worked in environments that have leveraged Microsoft's Office 365 email spam filtering, and they've been good, but generally, usability is sometimes a problem. It goes back to the UI and then the accuracy.

The amount of spam that is stopped has not always been great. As such, I feel that CES has a pretty good balance in that regard.

When I first started at the company, the product was already there. That was my first experience with the product, but I liked the product, and I thought it was very stable and working well.

We pay at least 25% more for Cisco Secure Email than Trend Micro. Cisco’s support is better than that of Trend Micro.

We have worked with Barracuda Email Security and Trend Micro Email Security.

We have had two runs with Cisco Secure Email. We initially ran it on-prem and that started in 2007. It was the same year, or a little bit before, Cisco bought the old IronPort product. And last year, we initially ended up dropping the on-prem, when we were moving into Office 365. Although we were happy with it, the thought was, "Okay, if we move everything to Office 365, Microsoft can handle that. We have their full-blown mail filtering products." We thought it would probably save us some workload, not having an extra product to deal with.

The intent was that we were going to consolidate to a single product when we moved to the cloud for email, and we found out that it didn't work as well as we had expected. We didn't do a direct conversion from the on-prem to the cloud solution. There were a couple of months between it during which we tried the Microsoft option.

We then found out that they were not nearly as good as one would expect from a market leader in corporate email. I then contacted Cisco about what it would cost to do it in the cloud with their products. I was rather surprised to find out that they don't charge anything more to host it, than they do to have you run it on your own equipment. We ended up jumping back into it with their hosted solution, without really planning to. When the cost came back and was as attractive as it was, we decided, "Okay, this Microsoft filtering is not working out. Let's go back to Cisco." We went back to it and it's been working really well, better than it did when it was on-prem, because we don't have to maintain as much of it.

We had been using encryption on Cisco before, but we did end up leaving that with Microsoft, just because it integrates with their Outlook browser better. I'm at something of a toss-up on which one I prefer. Because the Microsoft solution integrates directly with the Outlook client, it is a bit easier for users to manage. But the encryption on it seems to work fairly decently, although it has the same problem that all of them do. There are tons of standards for that. Everyone has their own. It would be great if there was some sort of multi-vendor standard for that but, without it, we moved it over to the Microsoft solution and that seemed that to be a little easier for users.

Because we had those few months in between, we didn't qualify for a license transfer. We had let the initial service lapse and then we brought on the cloud service.

We migrated from Cisco ESA to Cisco Cloud Email Security. 

The appliances were getting close to the end of life. They were using a lot of CPU, so it was time to do something with them. IT management seems to be going more to the cloud now, so it made sense to go to the Cisco Cloud solution. The machines that we had on-prem were really slow. For whatever reason, they were getting real slow. When we went to the cloud, we got away from that problem.

We had another appliance (Axway MailGate) and switched because it was outdated. Also, their support model wasn't that great. They were difficult to get a hold of after six or seven in the evening.

Comparing Microsoft Defender and Cisco's Email Secure service, partners have noted that while Microsoft Defender offers email security, the tool's additional layer of protection provides further defense against threats like spam and phishing emails. The AI features filter out phishing emails. I have worked with FortiMail and Barracuda before Cisco Secure Email. 

We were using Proofpoint and then we switched to Cisco. As I mentioned above, reportability was one of the main reasons we switched, but the biggest one was cost. If you can get an equivalent functionality for a better price it's wise to do so. That's what our primary decision came down to: We could get equivalent functionality at a lower price point.

When I got there, Cisco Secure Email Gateway was already implemented. We were only tuning it. Before my organization took over the operations for that bank, it was being taken care by someone else. I don't know what was implemented before that.

We did not use a solution prior to this one.

We were looking to automate most of the stuff related to email filtering, so the solution bought from IronPort (now a part of Cisco) was to reduce our workload.

I have previously used McAfee, Kaspersky, TrendMicro, barracuda, websense.

We were using Trend Micro and we are still using it now that we have Cisco Secure Email Gateway. Cisco's solution is more efficient and provides more options. For us, it also creates one more layer of security.

We switched to using IronPort because it gives us a second line of defense from spam, phishing, and all the other problem emails. One of the reasons was that there was a major spike in the number of spam and junk emails that people were sending from when we first got these systems. 

The other system that we had was suffering from performance problems because it was being overwhelmed by the volume of emails that were being delivered to Fugro. The other product was still a good product, but it didn't have the performance to handle the volume of email. With the IronPort system being used as a first line of defense, it probably would have done everything that our previous system did, and we could have just removed it from our email processing.

However, we wanted to retain the old system because it had some nice features to do with additional email filtering. Having IronPort as a first line of defense was really good, and then, it was possible to do special filtering and other email reaping on this other system. The other system could then perform at a good level because it was not being overwhelmed by the huge volume of spam, junk, etc.

The Cisco Email Security Appliance has enabled us to reduce spam by at least 30% compared to our previous solution.