We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Email and Avanan, based on PeerSpot users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Avanan is the preferred product over Cisco Secure Email based on user reviews. Avanan excels in advanced threat detection and prevention, with AI and machine learning continuously improving and updating its library. Avanan also has the best customer service, with professional, helpful, and innovative staff. Both products have positive ROI, but Avanan has an edge in reducing the number of compromised email accounts and phishing attacks, helping protect mobile devices, and providing explicit details on why emails are blocked.
"The most valuable feature is protection against malicious links, fishing, and impersonation. You can train people to be aware of these threats, but they're not always careful. When they're using their phones between meetings, they click on a link, and it's game over."
"Does a thorough job of examining email and URLs for malicious content."
"I like its investigation capabilities, as that is what is most important to me. It is fairly simple with a user-friendly interface."
"The product's scalability is good."
"I would say that 90% of the spam and phishing attack emails get blocked right off the bat."
"At the moment we are satisfied with this product. It's a stable, scalable, and resilient solution for us."
"The technical support is good and quick to resolve issues."
"Defender enables us to secure all 365-related activity from a single place. It gives us visibility into everything happening in Outlook, protecting us against phishing and other email-based threats. Defender helps us detect any suspicious behaviors."
"It can retract unsafe emails and remove them from the entire communication channel."
"The most valuable feature of Avanan is its effectiveness. When scanning incoming emails for threats it can in an automated fashion, quarantine suspicious attachments."
"Easy to use for non-technical users."
"Spam protection is the most valuable feature."
"This technology is one of Check Point's acquisitions, and it is currently a powerful tool that provides all the protection that is not found in other tools."
"I highly recommend this solution to any prospective buyer."
"The threat detection tools enable us to ascertain malware and phishing messages across the email network infrastructure."
"Email Attachment Protection detects any insecure files and quickly blocks them to prevent the spread of viruses to other secure documents."
"It sends us reports, where we can see if there have been attacks, e.g. DDoS. If so, we can switch to a clean IP."
"The most significant enhancement we've gained is in terms of security through the upgrade we received."
"Users were able to do a check by themselves on quarantined emails. They could check if a valid email had been stopped, if it matched up with the SPF certification."
"The most valuable feature is the different content filters we are using, such as DKIM."
"It's a bit easy to handle Cisco Secure Email; it's not that difficult. For the logs, which are in PDF format, it's not hard to read them. We don't need Wireshark much to analyze the logs."
"The system enables end users to manage their own whitelists/blacklists."
"We like the in-built features, like the email filtering based on the IP and domain. Cisco has its own blacklisted domains and IPs, which is very good. This filters around 70 percent of emails from spam, and we are seeing fewer false positives with this."
"I love the Advanced Malware Protection feature. It works very well... The appliance has more security such as SDF, DKIM, DMARC, and encryption."
"About eight months ago, we started to measure the quantity of phishing and spam that we have been receiving, and it has been increasing a lot. That means that protection for our email is not as good as we were expecting."
"In some situations, it has not been able to pick impersonated emails having no attachments. Technical support definitely has a scope for improvement."
"The pre-sales cost calculations could be more transparent."
"The UI needs to be more user-friendly."
"There's room for improvement regarding the time frame for retrieving emails."
"We need a separate license and we don't know how to get the license that is required."
"The only thing they should improve is the licensing model. They should stop changing it. A year ago, the five features I mentioned were included in one product. Now, three of them are bundled into one product, and you have to pay extra for the other two. I don't mind paying extra, but I don't want them to change it every year or every six months. I need to know what I'm looking at and not worry about it next year."
"The certification training for Defender for 365 needs to be deeper and incorporate Sentinel. I took all the security courses except one, and Sentinel isn't included."
"The customer service team could come up with clear tutorials on how to use this platform to help new teams."
"The cost can be reviewed to enable SMEs to acquire it and enjoy great security features."
"It should reduce the amount of time needed for thorough scanning."
"When sending bulky emails, the system slows down and takes a long time before it responds effectively to our requests."
"The system response in a slow computing device affects performance when sending and receiving emails."
"Avanan doesn't cover certain tool segments."
"There are times when we have false positives."
"The system could be designed to give corporate emails first priority due to demands."
"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."
"I would like to see sandboxing for email, where suspicious emails received by the system are analyzed through online services."
"Scalability has certain shortcomings and needs to be improved because there are service providers who provide better scalability.v"
"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 user interface is a bit complex."
"Many smaller businesses opt for more cost-effective solutions, such as Gmail or Hotmail accounts, instead of investing in Cisco Secure Email, given its higher cost."
"There are some concerns in the way the architecture is set up, making it an area where improvements are required."
"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."
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Avanan is ranked 6th in Email Security with 21 reviews while Cisco Secure Email is ranked 2nd in Email Security with 55 reviews. Avanan is rated 9.2, while Cisco Secure Email is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Avanan writes "We've noticed a significant decline from people accidentally or intentionally clicking on things". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Secure Email writes "Has effortless spam control, improves security posture, and frees up our IT department's time". Avanan is most compared with Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration, IRONSCALES, Perception Point Advanced Email Security, Abnormal Security and Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), whereas Cisco Secure Email is most compared with Trellix Collaboration Security, Fortinet FortiMail, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Proofpoint Email Protection and Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense. See our Avanan vs. Cisco Secure Email report.
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We monitor all Email Security reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.