Another company assisted in our deployment process. It's relatively easy to handle maintenance since another company takes care of that aspect. We focus on managing features and handling basic administration tasks.

The ease of deployment is contingent upon the size of the organization, specifically the number of users and titles involved. If the deployment is for a smaller organization, with a straightforward configuration, it can be completed quickly, often within a month or two. In contrast, for larger enterprises with a significant number of users, numerous branches, and a complex organizational structure, the deployment timeline can extend to six to eight months.

An integrator helped us with the product's installation. 

It was easy enough to do the implementation with Cisco and their support because we had adopted an enterprise agreement with them. Therefore, we had the support of Cisco implementing both Cisco Secure Email Cloud Gateway and Umbrella into our organization. They were very good at helping getting up and running.

There was one of my other staff who assisted me in setting up Cisco Secure Email Cloud Gateway with Cisco. It was relatively simple and easy. 

Doing Health Checks with Cisco have been fantastic. Being able to do those every few months and going through what other options that we might want to lock down or change gives us an opportunity to ask them questions, see what we could be doing better, or what new measures/features have been deployed, furthering securing our organization. The Health Checks are an invaluable service that Cisco provides to CES.

Deployment typically takes a whole day. The time can vary depending on the number of firewalls involved. Updating the system can also be time-consuming, especially with the new FCDI and FCDO operating systems.

Maintenance is actually quite easy after initial deployment. Once a supplier sets it up, ongoing maintenance is straightforward.

Cisco Secure Email can be integrated in-house, but we are too busy. Therefore, we have decided to use an integrator.

We handle end-to-end implementation and also provide support services.

I have done the architecture for a company in China.

We used consulting from Cisco the whole time during our migration. With the premium support we now have one person who knows our configuration, our needs, and who can help us more than in the past when we didn't have that level of support.

Cisco service engineers were the ones in charge. 

As this solution is hosted on Cisco's cloud, we don't manage the underlying infrastructure.

We probably have about eight individuals who work with it. Some of them are within our support organization, there are messaging or Exchange admins, and there are network engineers.

It was Cygate in Sweden from whom we bought the product. They were resellers for Cisco, but we installed it ourselves.

The deployment was done by the consultant company.

We were in touch with the technical contact from Cisco for some basic stuff, for getting started.

A few times, we needed Cisco's expertise in the migration process to solve some problems for free. Because it is in the cloud, you can't get to the command line interface to access and download/upload files. So, I had to rely on Cisco for that.

We worked with a partner consulting firm, Presidio, who very useful and helpful.

We did a proof of concept first off, then did a hard cut over on the weekend.

Since we are using Cisco cloud appliances, we had to have Cisco's involvement. They brought up the cloud appliances, where the initial configuration is done, and then we were the ones who started doing the final configurations, the moves and the migrations, as we entered the testing phase. We then moved more toward the final production move.

In terms of our experience with Cisco reps, I can speak on it more broadly as well, not just from a shear email-security perspective. When implementing a Cisco product, they're great in those initial stages. You get that expert help and it's a relatively smooth bring-up. For the things that go wrong, you have a Cisco person working with you who has the answer or knows who to go ping to get the answer. It's really nice.

That changes a little bit as time goes on. Once that expert is no longer helping you with your initial bring-up, then you rely more on the vendor's support matrix to get your solutions further tuned and to work out the little wrinkles as you experience them. Of course, it is universal - I haven't seen an example where this is exception - that this process is less smooth. 

As far as initial bring-up goes with Cisco, it's very smooth. Once that expert is no longer working with you on the bring-up and you run into issues and need to get help, that's less smooth. It's less smooth in that when you call any vendor's support line you get varying degrees of expertise. The same challenges are experienced with any international company where there could potentially be language barriers, based on where your call gets routed for support. That can slow the whole process down a bit.

That's just a reality of today's world, but it's workable. Unfortunately, it's a rather normal thing but there are different skillsets depending on the individual you're talking to, and then, depending on what the issue is and how complex the issue gets, your time to resolution may end up dragging out a lot longer than you had originally anticipated.

We worked with Cameo to do the integration.

An implementation partner, SecureLink, helped with the setup. They did a good job and were knowledgeable in the product. But, as an implementation partner, they do not take responsibility for any failures of the product.

Cisco helps with the day-to-day. 

We set up the filtering options ourselves.

We do the deployment ourselves. We also do maintenance and troubleshooting. We have around 20 L3 engineers on our technical team.

We used an integrator. I was not involved directly.

Because we had the systems before Cisco bought IronPort, we used some assistance from the then-IronPort company for the initial set up. But our own personnel were involved in training courses, so most of the configuration was done by Fugro people.

The IronPort consultants were very good. Because the company was keen for business, they were keen to assist us. At the time, we were, perhaps, one of the more unusual cases because of the quantity of junk, spam, and other types of emails that were being sent to Fugro recipients. IronPort, at that time, was very responsive, very helpful, easy to deal with and, usually, very knowledgeable about the product.

We had a partner who did the deployment and customization, who was very good. Also the Cisco support was there, so anything that we felt uncomfortable with, or when we could not understand policy, we just raised the case, and they helped us with it.

From our end, three to four people were involved in the deployment.