Cisco Secure Email Other Solutions Considered

NS
Director General at Icdc

We are in the process of assessing alternative options and examining various products, including technologies from companies like Barracuda and Microsoft Defender, which already include certain features. Finding alternatives is challenging because Cisco is unique and requires specialized skills, making it more expensive. Unlike Microsoft EOP or Defender, where the transition is smoother, Cisco's system is distinct and demands specific expertise.

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PC
Sr Infrastructure Engineer at Delta Plastics of the South

The only other vendor we really looked at seriously at the time was going with a Microsoft solution and Office 365. Even back then they had something, not that it was very good. But it's simply that we were a Cisco shop, in the sense that we've had Cisco firewalls and Cisco switches for the infrastructure. At that point we had already committed to their Firepower option on the firewalls that collected the information. We had been doing that for about a year. I went to one of their events in Little Rock and that's where they talked about it. I was intrigued and did some more research on my own and determined that this was something we couldn't pass up. 

We were a Cisco AMP shop for our antivirus already, which is part of Firepower in a sense. Everything was going to Talos already. The email just made sense because they would all talk to each other and they would get all the information from all the different angles, even across to web access through their Umbrella system. We used that for about a year. When we got our new SD-WAN, it had a lot of the same features the Umbrella system had and we dropped it at that point.

You can put all your eggs in one basket and that can be bad, but in this case it wasn't. It actually worked out well for us.

Everything goes through Cisco so we don't really see anything happening in Office 365. We do have the basic settings for this or for that set in Office 365, but we haven't gone in and fine tuned it the way we did Cisco, because Cisco's the main point of blocking things. When we chose the Cisco solution, there was no way Microsoft's Office 365 solution could have done what we needed it to do. There was no way it would have had any of these major capabilities we needed. It wouldn't have blocked a fraction of the email that the Cisco appliance does. I try to keep up on this and it could be that Microsoft's new ATP might be a game-changer. What I've read sounds a lot like the Cisco appliance. But Microsoft has thrown a kicker in there by adding artificial intelligence. With Microsoft, I wouldn't have had to put in all the name combinations because it would interpret all the names I need it to interpret, even with characters and symbols. I haven't tried it, and I don't have plans at the moment to do so, but from what I've read, Microsoft is catching up.

There are some issues with Microsoft with their integration, simply because you pretty much have to go all-in with Intune, Autopilot — all those features and tools they have to get Microsoft ATP to work. And then you've got to buy the Microsoft 365 E5 license to get all of those security features.

If things are similar, it all comes down to cost and we look at that every year when we renew. What are we paying Microsoft in subscription fees and what is Cisco costing us? So far, Cisco's been cheaper than upgrading Microsoft to the license level we need. Our contract renews in November, so we'll look at it again. That's when we really delve into Microsoft's capabilities. We would want to make sure it would do everything Cisco is doing, before we would make a change, if Microsoft were price-competitive.


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AF
Digital Program Manager at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Office 365’s native security controls to protect your organization compared to this solution are terrible. With Office 365, unless you actually pay for the advanced options with email security, they're actually quite useless. You've no control over the standard offering.

My previous organization did look at the Symantec Cloud solution. At both organizations, it didn't really make any economical sense to look at other vendors. If we had an enterprise agreement with Cisco, then you get the support from Cisco that's second to none, where you get somebody on the phone straightaway to work through your issue until it's resolved. My previous dealings with Symantec and McAfee are that they're not as customer-focused in terms of their support. Cisco has been.

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Buyer's Guide
Cisco Secure Email
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Cisco Secure Email. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
ED
Owner at Jolly Security Inc

These days, the first tiers of this market have good enough anti-spam, antivirus, etc. These have become routine. There are some other not-so-good solutions, like Barracuda and Fortinet, but it depends on how much you are willing to pay as this solution is not cheap.

The best other solution is Proofpoint. They have been long-time competitors who have also been evolving. The big difference is it is more fancy because it has more bells and whistles. The solution is good as well. However, they are super expensive, not cheap.

If you want a multi-tiered deployment, you could perhaps have Secure Email on the cloud and Proofpoint on-premises. Then, you have the two best solutions in the market working together. I have customers who have done this and are satisfied. Very few solutions can compete with Secure Email and Proofpoint outside of the price. If your budget is a problem, then you have a problem.

Along with Proofpoint, this is the best solution in terms of preventing spam, malware, and ransomware.

Check Point has fancy graphics and an interface where you can do a lot. The Cisco Secure gateway has both, though not as fancy as Check Point, but a big majority of the tasks can be done on the graphical interface level.

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DM
Security Technician at Mercadona

We know there are some solutions that have a higher level of protection for email, but we're very happy with the price of this one and with the way it is working.

We have Microsoft email security too, but not as the first line of defense. Microsoft's email security has its advantages but it is less secure, less configurable, and less powerful than Cisco's solution.

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Ahmed  Helmy - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Director, Business Development & Sales Operations at Connect professional services

Sometimes, customers choose Forcepoint or Barracuda. Usually, if the customers have a Cisco setup, they choose Cisco Secure Email.

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CN
Network Security Engineer at Galaxy Backbone Ltd

We have evaluated other solutions, such as FortiMail from Fortinet, but we stuck with Cisco ESA. ESA's pricing and licensing were what led to us trying to see how we can bring it all together.

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KhurramShahzad - PeerSpot reviewer
Network security manager at Cyber Vision

My company is looking for a new email filtering server or system. So, I was just making the comparison with Cisco and FortiMail, and that's what we're actually looking for a new or updated system. So this is the reason I was doing this R&D.

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SA
Network Team Lead at ASYAD

We did a couple of PoC, and it was leading at that time in the market. We compared it to Barracuda and a couple of others. Its ability had set it apart from others. The partner was good, and the PoC was on point. It did what needed to be done. 

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SD
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

We were just evaluating between Cisco and Microsoft's advanced threat protection.

We decided not to evaluate anyone else when we saw that Cisco was going to be less expensive than we thought it was going to be. My expectation going in was that the cloud service would cost more than the licensing for on-prem would, because they're hosting it. But that wasn't actually the case. It ended up costing about the same as what the on-prem cost, except that we didn't have to buy hardware anymore, which obviously saves some money.

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RL
Email Adminstrator at Merchants Capital Resources, Inc.

The familiar user interface was important in our decision to migrate from Cisco’s on-prem to Cloud Email Security. We have a lot of other projects going on. Being able to migrate to something that we were already familiar with versus migrating to Proofpoint or something else was a major decision factor. I didn't have to invest that much time, resources, and learning in a whole new product.

If you compare it over Proofpoint, it was a big savings. It was very competitive. It saved us from buying new appliances. Though, I don't know that would have been a big expense, because I didn't do a cost analysis of staying on-prem and replacing the appliances. We were more comparing the solution to Proofpoint, and the cost was considerably less than Proofpoint. It was already in place and working for us on-prem. So, I didn't want to move to Proofpoint because there would have been much more to learn.

Some of the things that we were doing in Cisco, we can't do it the same way in Proofpoint, from as much as I have looked at it. I know there is a difference. They have different solutions. They have some solutions that aren't configurable at all, such as, the lower price ones. They have another one where you are just like a tenant and everybody gets the same thing, then for it to be customizable, it is a lot more expensive. In orders of magnitude, it is more expensive than Cisco, which didn't make sense. With all the little tweaks and customizations that we're doing, I couldn't see how to do that based on the time I spent looking at Proofpoint. It might be doable, but I didn't figure out how to do it. So, I think Cisco is a little more configurable than Proofpoint for tweaking. I could be wrong, but that is my impression.

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KK
Senior Email Engineer at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We looked at two or three different vendors. One of the solutions that we looked at was a virtual Linux-based appliance. We did evaluate that and a proof of concept around it. However, it wasn't as robust as Cisco, as far as features and high availability.

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AD
Information Security Analyst at a healthcare company

Our top-three choices were considering staying with Proofpoint, as well as Cisco, and Microsoft. We were looking at the bigger names.

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TO
Security / Solution Architect at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We looked at some competitors, like Proofpoint but in comparison, we chose Cisco ESA because we kept the same technology. We knew that the migration path would be less effort than the migration part if we went to another solution or Barracuda.  

Proofpoint was very good at creating general DLP policies, in that you could create policies and you apply them on different platforms, like Teams.

Cisco is a state-of-the-art product. I think Microsoft is catching up really quickly when you take the E5 license builder with it. I think Microsoft can take over the competition from Cisco but it could take a while.

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MM
Senior IT System Administrator at ScanPlus GmbH

We tested only two other solutions, the Trend Micro product and the Check Point product, so I can't compare Cisco with all the solutions out there, but it's all the solution we need. For phishing and malware it's doing a good job.

We didn't like the instability with Trend Micro. Check Point was complicated to use; it was a very complex system. The Cisco system is intuitive, simple to use and simple to understand. I am a technician in our company, so I don't know which solution is cheap or which is expensive. But for the functionality we stay with Cisco because Cisco is our partner and this email appliance can connect with other Cisco products. They work together and that gives us confidence in using Cisco Secure Email.

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SS
Information Security Analyst at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees

We are currently using two different email security products, which is how we are able to identify the pros and cons of Cisco Email Security. We use a similar product called FireEye. It can detect based on sandboxing. Anything bad that it sees, it will detect. It is not based on file extension or file types. Recently, we have been able to block with it using some type of file extensions or hash.

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SA
Group Head of Cyber Security at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I am familiar with McAfee and Symantec to some extent. But we have not used those solutions in our production environment. I can't say much about specific differences between the solutions, but Cisco is more stable and we have not faced any issues with its detection capabilities that would make us look at other solutions.

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MQ
Network Security Consulting Engineer at a manufacturing company

Cisco Secure Email Gateway was our first choice.

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AS
Regional ICT Security Officer EMEA at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

We did evaluate other options, but it was a long time ago so I'm not sure I can remember which other options we considered.

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SB
System Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We are also using Sophos Email Appliance in conjunction with Cisco Email Security. We use them both together as a solution.

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MM
Network Engineer at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees

We are looking for a solution. We are in communication with other vendors to integrate with Email Security or to provide us a new solution.

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JA
Network Security Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

After using Cisco Secure Email Gateway we used Trend Micro. The difference between them is just the vendor. There's really no difference. Same approach. It's the same technology. I would say Trend Micro is more granular. But overall, It's the same technology. I don't think one is better than the other. Who you buy from depends on marketing.

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Buyer's Guide
Cisco Secure Email
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Cisco Secure Email. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.