What is our primary use case?
Our primary use case is really for spam and malware, in and out of the organization.
How has it helped my organization?
Barracuda will block emails, then they talk to my support people and they resolve which ones they need to release, as long as there's no malware or anything in them. On the cloud service, each user can go in and release their own emails, but it still gets tested before. The only ones that are released are the ones that have nothing that's considered to be dangerous, containing spam information or malware. They can release a mass email that is clean.
What is most valuable?
With the cloud service, one of the nice things about Barracuda is the quarantine service. It gives the ability for our users to go in and check what has been quarantined, and then connect with our IT staff to release anything that should be fine so that we can test it before we release.
For how long have I used the solution?
More than five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Stability is very good. We haven't had any issues in terms of downtime or anything as yet since we got the service.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
For our needs, it's definitely very scalable. They have much larger organizations on that service as well. Everyone in my organization uses it. All my email goes through a filtering process.
How are customer service and technical support?
Their technical support is very good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We did the research and looked at what we wanted to do. At that point in time, Barracuda was the most effective solution.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward and very easy. It was easy in terms of the cloud service. As part of the process, they walked us through the implementation and the migration from our on-prem appliance to the cloud service. A lot of our rules and all that we had tied up, made on our on-prem appliance, they migrated it over to the cloud service, so we didn't really have to do too much in terms of setup. The entire deployment took around a week by the time we tested everything out.
We first set up a small group to test it out first to make sure everything seemed to be working the way it should be. Once we were convinced that everything was fine, we ran the two services in parallel, one behind the other. When we were happy with the way things were running, we turned off the appliance and went full tilt with the cloud service.
It requires one person who does part-time maintenance because there's really not much to do once you apply this.
What about the implementation team?
We worked with the onboarding team at Barracuda.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
For overall value and cost, Barracuda came in as most appropriate, price as well as services provided. In terms of price, it's average . It's not the most expensive, it's not the least expensive but it works well.
What other advice do I have?
We never had an issue with Barracuda. It worked flawlessly. Updates were regularly downloaded on the appliance itself, and we would get an email saying that the latest version is there and they would ask if we wanted to install it. Then my administrator would go in and check it out and install the application service. It did it automatically and there was always a backup process. The support was very good with them as well if we ran into any difficulties, so that wasn't an issue.
I would advise someone considering this or a similar solution to make sure that you know all of the email domains that you have within the organization. Make sure that they are set up. There's a bit of configuration work that's needed with the DNS service provider, but other than that, everything else should be very smooth. The team at Barracuda helps walk you through the process and the pitfalls as well.
I would rate it an eight out of ten. There are two more portions that we haven't implemented yet. It's really just apply and forget. It does the work itself. We've had some times when certain things come through, but once we apply the proper whitelisting or blacklisting, we get it all sorted out again. Spam and all that are moving targets as well.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.