Barracuda Email Security Gateway Reviews

The solution helps us to block some blacklisted emails.

We are using the tool’s 400 model which does not offer accurate spam detection. We have also had performance issues with the tool.

I have been working with the solution for three years. The tool’s model number that I work with is 400.

The solution is stable. We had faced some stability issues which got resolved after replacing some hardware.

The solution is scalable. You can scale up or down the hardware appliances as per your license.

The tool’s deployment is simple.

I find the tool’s tech support very supportive.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

As a large organization, we require a powerful email spam filter and an email security gateway. This is our primary use case for Barracuda Email Security.

This appliance has helped in that we now eliminate the thousands of scams, spam, and malware emails that are destined for our users. It also helps if a user has deleted an external email by mistake because we can retrieve it from the appliance and re-send it to them.

The features that we find most valuable are spam and virus protection. Another is the protection against e-mail spooling. Also, if the email server experiences an outage then we can see the status of all spooled emails, and whether an email has been re-delivered.

Two improvements that are needed include an enhancement in the proxy feature, as well as the ability to more fully automate patches and updates.

In my experience, this is a stable product.

Customer support is good. They act promptly in response to any issues or error.

We did not use another solution in the past.

The initial setup for this appliance is not complex. It is very easy to configure and deploy.

We used a vendor team to implement this solution the first time, and we found them to be very capable with a very high level of expertise.

The price of this solution is very high, but it's working fine.

We did not evaluate options other than this one.

If you want to secure your network then you must acquire a spam filter and virus firewall. In my opinion, Barracuda is the best choice.

We are an MSP (Managed Service Provider) so, basically, all of our business clients who want email security are using this product.  

Barracuda has made things easier simply by making it so all of us do not have to go through the mounds of spam that would be coming in otherwise. It has made our lives a lot simpler in letting us see what is valuable in our inboxes rather than a blob of emails users have to hunt through.  

It is really hard to pinpoint any one feature that is more valuable than the others. I mean, the features are all valuable. If I had to choose, I guess the spam filtering part of the product stands out as phenomenal. The time it saves in eliminating inbox clutter and the focus that creates allows staff to be more productive instead of absolutely wasting time manually filtering spam.  

An improvement I would encourage is that sometimes the spam filtering is a little too aggressive. You can not get granular enough to back off what is considered spam and what is not. So it is fine that they have predefined settings for spam, but not so good that it can not be modified. If we could go in and modify the settings or affect the way it is treating spam, I think that would allow for more versatility and better results.  

I have been using Barracuda Email Security Gateway for probably a little over two years.  

The stability of Email Security is fine. We have had no real issues with it.  

Scalability is very, very easy. We have over 40 clients with multiple end-users currently using it, so it has already proven to be very scalable.  

Primarily the people using the product are actually the end-users. They could be CFOs, CEOs, company presidents, office managers — the whole gamut of employees use the product if they use the network. We are an MSP, so we are literally servicing the whole range of different companies and different end-user needs with pretty high volume capability.  

I would say their technical support is a ten. They are really good. They support you right from the beginning with training and make you comfortable adopting the product.  

Barracuda was actually the first product like this that we utilized. We were looking for a product to take care of spam and email security. In our comparison, we found this product to be the solution for us at the time.  

The initial setup is pretty straight forward as long as you pay attention when you get the training. Record that training session.  

The pricing for the product is fine. It matches what we can budget to the functionality we expect.  

Security Gateway is simple to implement. Make sure that multiple people on staff are trained in setting it up. In other words, you do not want to just be relying on one individual in the organization to be the only one who is able to set it up. Always have a backup, or even two. That is especially important to us as an MSP.  

One more thing would be to pay attention when you first onboard with the solution. Barracuda puts you through some training with one of their technicians. I think it is important that you record those training sessions to keep for your reference. What will happen if you do not take advantage of recording it is that after the first two or three installs, you will be on your own. If you make sure you make a copy of your training session with them, then you can always refer back to it.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product overall as a nine-of-ten. The reason I would give it a nine is just that one area where we do not have the ability to manually go in and modify some of the settings. Until we can do that, it is still a great product but it is not quite a ten.  

Our primary use of this solution is for the main features: intelligent sensing of attacks and the assistance for load balancing. The features are very good. The system is intelligent enough to determine which emails are genuine and deliverable and which are spam or phishing or other types of potential attacks. It processes emails in real-time and it can protect your email server and provide good security for an organization's network.

It provides a solution for protecting our infrastructure from malicious email attacks without having to use a lot of internal resources to support the product. 

The most valuable features are really the same as our primary use for the product: intelligent handling of potential email attacks and offloading or load-balancing. This effectively protects the organization from malicious attacks.

One aspect of the product that can be improved is the availability of support. We don't have the availability of support 24/7, and it takes some time to get answers. These technical support people are in some other country, and our time zone is not supported. 

We have to often give them remote access to resolve issues, so potentially it is a security risk also. Sometimes clients who we resell to will not accept that risk because you are opening a secured doorway to the internet. That can be a bit of headache in those cases, which we end up having to work-around.

Actually the rest of the product is very good and it is otherwise meeting our requirements. I would only hope they would provide better support in our country.

This is a very stable product. But the stability depends on supporting the product to let it meet the requirements of your organization. We always have to scale according to the demands of our call center. We needed to know how many emails flow in and out of our organization and based on that we choose the correct model of the product. Any organization will have to do this. Once you ensure which product model you need to meet your level of service, then it will be stable.

If you don't size it properly and you under-size it, then you will have a network or email flow issue. For example, if you know you have 2,000 emails flowing in and out per hour and you buy a product which supposed to handle only 200 or 300 emails per hour, then it will slow your email server. At times miscalculating your volume or not buying the right product — maybe to save money — may cause a situation where it will jam and not even work. So stability depends upon how intelligently you approach the analysis of what you really need as a solution.

The product is scalable by choosing the right plan. If you need to scale up or down, that is possible. Pricing will change accordingly.

We occasionally use support, but find it frustrating because it is not global 24/7 and we are affected by the time zone. We don't have local support and because of that we sometimes have to sit late night to troubleshoot with live support or wait for answers. This is the one place where the company could greatly improve the utility of the product for us.

I have used three advanced email security systems, including Trend Micro (InterScan), Cisco IronPort, and Barracuda Email Security Gateway. All three are good solutions but each has its advantages. Cisco, I think, is very expensive compared to Barracuda or Trend Micro. Trend Micro is less expensive but more difficult to deploy and use.

It wasn't so much a case of switching products for my current organization as it was choosing the product that fits with our needs. It was better for us to save a little using Barracuda in cost compared to Cisco and in time and effort compared to Trend Micro.

The deployment took about one week. It was easy to deploy. All the information you need is supplied by the company. You just have to make the proper considerations and do some fine-tuning. Then it can be put into production.

Because we are an enterprise company, we deal with integrators, but we also work with Barracuda directly. So we use both integrators as well as Barracuda support.

Barracuda Email Security Gateway is sort of a mid-range price high-end solution. The pricing is scalable depending on the volume of use.

In our choice of a product to use as an email security system, I mostly went by previous experience in using Trend Micro and Cisco IronPort. These are two other very good options.

As far as advice to other organizations considering this solution, I would generally recommend the product. But it depends. I can recommend Barracuda as a user because I have not had any problem with it. But if your organization has a limited budget, you might want to consider going with Trend Micro. Trend Micro is also a very good product, and it is a little cheaper than Barracuda when it comes to pricing structure. But Trend Micro is also not as easy to implement and use as Barracuda. So you would have to determine whether Barracuda is worth investing in so that you save time and effort. Barracuda costs a little more, but it is easier to use, more user-friendly and has a little better reputation.

On a scale from one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate Barracuda Email Security Gateway as a seven out of ten. This rating is lower even though I am completely satisfied with this product as a solution. The big problem is not the product, but the support — which I consider a very important factor. If I can't get support on time or I have to work inconvenient hours to get live support, this ends up affecting our services.

One other thing I think I should mention is that the reporting system for Barracuda is very good. Good reporting is important to the utilization of the product in an efficient manner.

We use Barracuda Email Security Gateway for email security.

It's a good solution. Maybe if we switch to the cloud version, it will be more up-to-date. It's a good one.

It catches a lot of things and has the ability to add domains as well as add senders and update their things.

It could be more automated. Many solutions in the industry are now receiving automatic updates. This one, we believe, is not; however, a later version may be better.

It's good, but some spam isn't always detected. It doesn't always detect the most recent signatures or spam. 

The database is not updated automatically. Other solutions, such as Microsoft Exchange Online, automatically receive the most recent threat data and malware data types. I believe the Barracuda database is not being updated. That is why we are looking, and we are evaluating whether Defender for Office 365 or a Microsoft solution is better than Barracuda. 

That is why we are downloading all of this research to see which of the market leaders we should switch to.

Spam is not always detected, and it should be more automated. We have seen that some emails are allowed by these emails, which are then stopped by Microsoft.

We now have two layers of defense. Barracuda and we also have Microsoft Exchange online, but we would like to switch to one or upgrade this. We are looking for any and all solutions.

That is what we are investigating right now. Because we want to ensure that some are stopped here by Barracuda and the entry point. However, for those that are not caught or blocked by Barracuda, we have the next layer of Exchange Online, which comes into the picture and checks it, sees it, and blocks it.

I joined an organization that has been using Barracuda for a few years, but they are looking into other options. 

I only recently joined them, about six months ago.

I have been working with Barracuda Email Security Gateway for six months.

I don't recall, which version we are using but it is not the latest one.

Barracuda Email Security Gateway is a stable solution.

I believe that Barracuda Email Security Gateway is scalable. We didn't make many changes to the architecture. But I believe it is scalable.

We have a small IT team of three to four people.

We have small IT teams and approximately 50-60 business users. There are only three or four people who are directly involved with the product.

I am not aware of the initial setup. It was already deployed when I joined.

This solution is difficult to maintain, which is why updates should be automatic, in my opinion. It should be intelligent enough to get the most recent updates, which it is not at the moment.

I believe it is, but I believe it does not catch everything. Perhaps we need more collaboration, more technology companies.

I am not aware of the licensing costs.

My senior colleague appears to believe that Exchange is superior. Because it receives the most recent updates and Microsoft is the largest, it has more Intel on this. We are getting more data, including real-time data updates.

I have yet to compare it with other solutions, but I would rate Barracuda Email Security Gateway a seven out of ten.

We use this solution for filtering and enhancing our email.

This solution has helped to significantly reduce the amount of junk email that we receive.

We really like the logging system in this solution. It is easy to track down email messages that a user has misplaced, or didn't realize that they got. Perhaps it came in but was wrong because the sender had the wrong email alias, for example. You can track down and find things like this.

The pricing of this solution could be improved.

The reports are standard, and it would be nice to be able to customize them.

It would be nice if the appliance itself was scalable, rather than having to replace it.

This solution is fairly stable. We have had the appliance replaced a couple of times due to some kind of failure, but over nine years, you're bound to replace it once or twice. When this happened, they were pretty good with the turnaround and getting it back to us.

I would say that this specific appliance is not scalable. While the product, overall, is scalable, we would have to accomplish this by moving up to a different model.

We have approximately two thousand email users who are using the filtering, blocking, and quarantine features. We receive about ten thousand pieces of email per day.

We have been in contact with technical support over the span of its lifetime. They are really good at helping us and working through problems, or trying to fix the appliance when needed.

When a replacement is needed they send us a new box and we ship back the old one. This is part of the additional coverage that we purchased.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup was straightforward and fairly simple. We were able to do it without support from the vendor. It took us approximately two days to get it up and going.

Our ISP had to set up a DNS NET at the time it was deployed.

We handled the implementation in-house after purchasing it from a reseller. It was myself, and I had some assistance from our ISP at the time of the deployment.

There are three or four of us who handle the management and administration.

The cost of this solution is based on the size of the product that you buy and the number of users. In our case, it is just based on staff.

Our licensing fees are approximately $4,000 per year, and this includes updates for the antivirus and spam signatures. They are always trying to keep up with the spammers.

We were looking for something that was easy for us to deploy and would work. We did evaluate at least one other solution before selecting this one.

This is a good product. It works, it's reliable, and it's helpful. We feel that it is worth the money that has been spent on it.

Overall, the product is effective, but the scalability is limited.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this as our email security gateway for the protection of the emails. 

Before this solution, we didn't have any separate feature for protecting our emails. We used to only have a firewall but now we have email security. It has a graphical interface and we can see the log every time. We can see that the performance is fine.

The complete filtering feature for all of the emails is valuable for us. It filters all of the emails. There are lots of attacks that come to our network through emails and it does a good job of blocking that. 

We had an incident where we didn't want to receive any emails or spam from a certain site and email address. We selected the mail ID, and we send it to Barracuda for analysis to see if it's spam or something like that. As of now, we haven't gotten any update or notification as to what happened with it.

I would like to see there be better implementation.

Compared to web stability, email stability is better. 

The initial setup was quite straightforward. The set up is not too complicated. The deployment only took a few hours. 

We used a consultant who is partners with Barracuda for the deployment.

License prices are okay. 

We have 250 - 300 users. 

This product is good more any medium-sized company that uses email. 

I would rate it an 8.5 out of ten. Not a ten because there is room to improve. They can do more with their R&D.

We are using Barracuda Email Security Gateway to protect against inbound malware, spam, phishing, and Denial of Service attacks to ensure that our business productivity isn't impacted by attacks through the email system. 

As Barracuda Email Security Gateway is based on the cloud, we don’t need to worry about the maintenance of our software or the hardware it resides on. Compatibility and upgrades are taken care of by the cloud service provider.

The product safeguards user mail for gateway defense, data protection, business continuity, AI-based inbox defense, and automated threat detection and incident response.

Artificial intelligence improvement could be used to help block spam and phishing mail that is directly delivered to users. 

We have been using Barracuda Email Security Gateway for the last two years.