We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Email and Symantec Messaging Gateway based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Email Security solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It also gives me good visibility because, with Defender, I'm using a Microsoft product to defend Microsoft products. The integration was really seamless and I have wide visibility because it picks up almost everything. Literally, I can see almost every activity that happens, from the e-mail to the workstation itself."
"The product's scalability is good."
"The risk level notifications are most valuable. We get to know what kind of intrusion or attack is there, and we can fix a problem on time."
"The initial setup is straightforward. You just add the license, click it, and then you can set up the rules. It is quite simple."
"Defender for 365 is a comprehensive cloud-based solution. The value of the cloud is that you aren't alone. Threat intelligence and analytics are shared in the cloud. We don't have to find the solution alone. If you face an unknown threat with traditional solutions like Trend Micro and Symantec, you need to open a case and send your information to them to analyze forensically and identify the source of the attack."
"The solution is very easy to use. All you have to do is to assign the license to the end-user and it's done. The customer will only have the feature activated, and the solution will monitor the emails to determine if they are a threat or not."
"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."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable feature is its performance."
"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."
"Spam controls are excellent because they are a powerful feature that operates almost effortlessly."
"What I find the most valuable about Cisco Secure Email is that the logs are not that difficult to see even if you're not used to them. The logs are reasonably readable and diagnosing the problem is not too hard with them."
"At one point, there was a zero-day attack. The Cisco appliance detected it and stopped it, helping us out. We avoided the attack and potential damage."
"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 tech engineers are very knowledgeable."
"Initially, the most valuable feature for us was the SenderBase Reputation, because that reduced the number of emails that were even considered by the system by a huge number..."
"The most valuable feature is the different content filters we are using, such as DKIM."
"I like that it's simple and easy to configure, deploy, and manage. The reporting function has all the features we're looking for, and we are fine with that."
"It is a solid and stable product."
"The solution is stable and the performance is good."
"The setup is pretty simple."
"It has very good capabilities for managing malware."
"Messaging Gateway is stable."
"The most valuable features of Symantec Messaging Gateway are advanced content filtering, malware, and antivirus defense."
"What I like most about Symantec Messaging Gateway is its usability. I also find its interface very friendly. The solution has a very good interface."
"Several simulation options are available within 365, and the phishing simulation could be better."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 should improve the troubleshooting tools. It's unclear whether the device is blocked at the firewall level or at the device itself. The granularity needed for troubleshooting is currently lacking. From my perspective, Microsoft should address this issue to benefit many users who likely share the same sentiment."
"The UI needs to be more user-friendly."
"Microsoft security solutions work as expected. They are constantly updating the solutions to make them better. At the same time, the changes can impact a customer's environment, and we need to adjust settings. Sometimes we aren't aware of the changes, and nothing is pushed from the backend automatically."
"It would be better if it were more scalable. It depends on the architecture, but we would like to make it more scalable for both data centers."
"We are always looking for others tools to increase automation on tasks. There can be better integration with other solutions, such as PowerPoint and email."
"Microsoft sometimes has downtime, and we'll get several incidents coming in back to back. We have a huge backlog of notifications, many of which may be false positives. However, there might be serious alerts, so we can't risk dismissing all of them at once."
"We need to be able to whitelist data at the backend."
"The solution needs to improve its advanced phishing filters. It is very good at filtering things which have bad reputations. However, when phishing or malicious emails are new or coming from a legitimate source, we don't feel that the solution is working."
"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."
"I have some frustrations with the user experience in the interface, specifically with regard to making a list of people for whom I want to allow email access."
"The tool's pricing can be improved."
"There could be additional DLP functionality for it."
"Cisco is already providing a very good environment with the IronPort solution, but there could be some more integration with other products. For instance, an integration with the EDR solution could be there to raise an alert."
"The initial setup was complex because I have two sites with physical clusters."
"The product's GUI for the dashboard needs improvement."
"The solution interface is from 2003 and is outdated. Symantec Messaging Gateway needs to update the interface."
"What's lacking when you compare it with Proofpoint and other threat protection solutions is that it does the basic stuff, but we need more advanced threat handling."
"Sometimes the solution picks up false positive for viruses during scans."
"The false positive submissions must be improved."
"The product must improve the user dashboards."
"Symantec Messaging Gateway should include better exclusions and exceptions for better administration."
"This product would benefit from better integration with Symantec Endpoint Protection."
"It will provide Excel reports and PDF reports, but it would be great if they supported the concept of Crystal Reports."
More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco Secure Email is ranked 2nd in Email Security with 26 reviews while Symantec Messaging Gateway is ranked 6th in SEG (Secure Email Gateway) with 12 reviews. Cisco Secure Email is rated 8.6, while Symantec Messaging Gateway is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Email writes "The amount of traffic that it stops is massive". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Symantec Messaging Gateway writes "A stable and reasonably priced solution that performs well and has a very good malware database". Cisco Secure Email is most compared with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Trellix Collaboration Security, Fortinet FortiMail, Proofpoint Email Protection and Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration, whereas Symantec Messaging Gateway is most compared with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Fortinet FortiMail, Trend Micro Email Security, Proofpoint Email Protection and Barracuda Email Security Gateway. See our Cisco Secure Email vs. Symantec Messaging Gateway report.
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