Cisco Secure Email Reviews

It's pretty normal daily incoming and outgoing emails. We have customized policies based on our security measures using this tool to scan the emails in our inboxes. We also check all incoming emails.

Because we can customize policies with it, we have good documentation.

I can customize the configuration and policies.

There should be some type of help section that can help us configure clients' emails. Sometimes, we just need to customize the quality. 

The graphical user interface is not user-friendly like other vendors. I find it very difficult at times to find some options on the UI. 

It's very difficult to configure at that time. 

Three to five years.

I have had no complaints with the stability.

The scalability is quite good. We have three administrators using it. The product is serving around 2000 to 3000 people in our environment.

The technical support is quite good. Whenever I need them, I just raise a case, then someone responds. I have no complaints.

The implementation is quite straightforward, but the customization can is a bit difficult. It took us three hours to implement and three to seven days to configure.

Before implementing, we had to design a new program.

We had a partner who did the deployment and customization, who was very good. Also the Cisco support was there, so anything that we felt uncomfortable with, or when we could not understand policy, we just raised the case, and they helped us with it.

From our end, three to four people were involved in the deployment.

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

Overall, it is a very good product, and I'm very happy with it.

• Facility of management
• Documentation

We're now protected against spam emails.

We use the CLI for management, but it's not very good. It's based on Java and it's very difficult to use.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's very stable. We've had no issues with instability.

The scalability has been OK.

We had to configure it, but it wasn't complex.

We are using two security appliances. One is a web security appliance, IronPort, as well as the Cisco Secure Email Gateway. They are used for web surfing.

We need to differentiate among users with specific boundaries. Some users have full access and some users only have limited access. That is what we are using it for.

It integrates with Active Directory and we can limit specific users to using specific applications. 

I would like to see a cloud service implemented for IronPort with specific domains which companies register to blacklist. Emails or anything coming from those domains should be automatically blocked or automatically scanned. Cisco should implement a cloud service for IronPort. It should scan automatically, without our needing to say, "Scan this," or "Scan that." It should be done from their side.

Also, the hardware is not up to the mark. Two to three times a year we have complete downtime. There must be an issue with the hardware itself. The software is very good. It works really well, but when it comes to the hardware it's not good enough because of the downtime. That hasn't happened with any Cisco device until now.

Three to five years.

The scalability is really good for multiple users. There is no issue with the scale. We have 300 to 400 users.

Technical support is really good. As far as I know, whenever we need it, they help us very well. Within half an hour or an hour of our call, we get technical support to WebEx us, depending on the situation or the issue. That's pretty quick.

The initial setup was straightforward. There was nothing complicated. It doesn't take more than two engineers. When it comes to the software, if there is good coordination between a Cisco guy and an email-server guy, the two of them would be enough to implement it.

It was really easy to implement. Even a newcomer joining the company could easily implement it. There is nothing complicated in the device. It can be easily implemented without headaches.

We took a three-year license. In addition to the standard licensing, there is a cost for SMARTnet as well. That is necessary because the hardware device is not stable at all. So if anything goes wrong we have two appliances to use. With SMARTnet, Cisco will send a new device within a week.

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.

The Cisco Secure Email Gateway, in my opinion, is a really good device. In terms of configuration of the software, it's just click, click, and you are done. If you have redundancy then you are in safe hands. It's a very good solution for email security.

We could be changing the appliance. I have heard from someone that Cisco has released some appliances for email security. I believe we need to try this. We may change our existing device and move to a new Cisco technology. We would keep the software. We usually upgrade it based on the newest versions.

Until now, I haven't seen any breach or any attack on the Cisco Secure Email Gateway.

Overall, I would rate this solution at nine out of ten. I could give it a ten if the hardware was better.

We use it for email filtering, spam filtering, for phishing attacks, malware, and forged-email detection. We also use it for outbound message control, to filter attachments that are allowed to be sent and attachments that are not allowed to be sent. It's for data loss protection.

It saves a lot of time wasting. For example, phishing attacks distract a user's attention, and forged emails waste a lot of time. A user can lose data. This solution helps protect user data.

It blocks

• bulk marketing messages
• graymail
• spam

and provides advanced malware protection.

I would like to see sandboxing for email, where suspicious emails received by the system are analyzed through online services. Some vendors, like Fortinet, have this feature in their firewalls, the FortiSandbox.

It's a very stable product. We hardly have any issues. Issues are mostly around license activation and the like. It's a reliable product and very popular here in the Middle East.

It's scalable. A medium-sized business would go with a C370 while a small business would use a C190. We are able to migrate users from lower-level to higher-level products. Scalability is not a big issue for this product. The same configuration can run 500 users and 3,000 users.

The few times we have contacted technical support we have received very good performance from them. This is one of the strong points. They have very good technical support. They provide timely responses. Technical support is very good from Cisco for every product.

The setup is very straightforward. It's very simple to install. It hardly takes 30 minutes.

There is a strategy for deploying, like determining how many users' emails do you want to pass through it. There is a long document, we call it High-level/Low-level deployment. And after that we, pass emails through from the Exchange Server, incoming and outgoing, to configure the kinds of emails the product should filter.

A deployment requires a maximum of two people: One is a network engineer and one is an Exchange system administrator, so if he wants to he can configure rules according to his requirements.

Pricing depends on your environment and which model you want to buy.

You need redundancy. If you have a standalone setup there is a risk of failure. If that goes down you lose email communication.

We have deployed this product for multiple customers in the Middle East, in the UAE, particularly in Dubai. We have many customers using this product, mostly medium-sized enterprises.

I have experience as an SE for IronPort as well as a private consultant. I have used this solution in multiple environments.

I have been able to help customers improve their email security, both new customers purchasing Cisco Secure Email Gateway, as well as long-time users. 

The most valuable features are Advanced Malware Protection, URL filtering, and of course Reputation Filtering.

The reporting functionality needs to be improved.

I have been using Cisco Email Security for nearly 15 years.

The Cisco Email Security Appliance is being used as the primary email gateway for our datacenter. We use the Cisco Email Security Appliance to receive, send, scan, and filter our incoming and outgoing email.

We use the Talos Threat intelligence to filter out known 'bad' email sender. The Sophos Antivirus plugin for antivirus scanning and the DKIM signing for our outgoing mails.

The system enables end users to manage their own whitelists/blacklists and provides our service desk with the means to troubleshoot email delivery issues with ease.

On-box DKIM and DMARC features let us secure our email flows and reduce the risk of our domains being used for spamming.

Administration of the email domains and custom filters are easily done via the web interface.

The user interface could be updated. Better dashboards and more interactive overviews would be nice, but the current functionality is sufficient.

Three to five years.

The Cisco Email Security Appliance has enabled us to reduce spam by at least 30% compared to our previous solution.

We chose Cisco Iron Port as it delivers strong email security protection and our company needed it to protect the company's email systems from spam, email viruses, .exe files, unwanted email from unwanted sender etc. For this, we choose Cisco Iron Port c160. Cisco Iron Port is a solid 1U appliance, no need for additional hardware, easy to plug into existing network. Email channel protection worked across the board without regard for which email client we used. When Cisco engineers became aware of the XML file rule not working as designed they immediately recorded this in their internal issues database and provided us with an issue ID. More significantly, they quickly supplied a workaround that allowed us to block XML files using a different type of rule.

More than a few steps are required to apply rules and these are not essentially intuitive. Even though we were able to get real-time event information from the email logs, it would be nice if the higher-level journalism tools could synchronize more quickly. Price might be an obstacle for smaller networks. Need to reduce the price so that small organizations can use this product.

My primary use case was email security, to protect against phishing mails, spam, malware, and viruses. 

We used to get emails with viruses that would impact the business or we would get emails with malware. We were able to scan the email and clear it or block emails with viruses. That was the business justification. On a weekly basis, it was blocking about 2,000 or 2,500 emails.

It protects you, it protects your network, it protects you from phishing emails and malicious content and the like.

The most valuable feature was the anti-spam feature. You could set rules to block emails based on specific words like "pornography," "sex," "guns," "violence." That was one thing I liked about it. With the anti-spam, we didn't get all those emails.

Also, Cisco was scanning our emails with their own intelligence. I liked that.

Finally, the user interface was quite friendly, it was quite easy to use, unlike some other Cisco products. Anybody could use it. You don't have to be familiar with IT to be able to handle navigating it.

There were a couple of access issues.

Also, they need to keep their intelligence top-notch. I remember a particular phishing email that came through to my then-CEO. So they could improve on their intelligence.

One to three years.

It's quite stable. We didn't have issues because, when I think about the issues, they were from us. The two boxes were in cluster, so when the guys at the other site would start without telling us, we would get cluster error messages. Apart from that, it was fine.

In terms of scalability, I'm pretty much sure we could go as high as 1,500 users.

The support is great. It's one of the best, if not the best. If you have a particular issue, Cisco can SSH tunnel into your box and help you fix it. As long as we had a running contract, their response time was five minutes, tops. 

If you don't have a running contract but there is a security issue, say malware, for example, they'll respond. But if it has to do with hardware, they don't respond. They'll tell you to get a contract before they'll respond. It depends on what the issue is.

The deployment was quite easy. We wanted it with high-availability. It wasn't a greenfield, it was just an upgrade. The initial deployment had been done before.

The GUI is self-explanatory: If you want to block emails, you want to erase emails, you do the IP address configuration and what your DNS is. It's pretty simple, a very easy-to-use GUI. If you want to buy licenses, you want to check the status of your licenses, you want to check the status of your box, you want to check the environment, it's very simple.

The upgrade took me about 30 minutes for each box. It was just me involved in the upgrade.

The ROI is about business continuity. If you get hit by malware through an email, you'll understand. Email security is a must-have; not necessarily Cisco Secure Email Gateway, but email security. It can come from any vendor, as far as I'm concerned.

The licensing was not per user, the licensing model was per feature. You could choose anti-virus, anti-spam, etc. It was feature-based and charged yearly. Aside from the standard licensing fees, you have to pay for support.

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.

Email security is a must-have, and as much as the cloud providers will tell you they have security, from our own experience, the vendors' security products are a bit superior. The reasons I chose Cisco Secure Email Gateway are the interface is - it's easy to use - and the support is great. Also, it's nice to have another gateway, not just the Cisco Secure Email Cloud Gateway because it has proven not to be enough.

The organization I was working in where Cisco Secure Email Gateway was implemented had about 700 staff members, roughly 700 email boxes. There were no plans to increase usage of Cisco Secure Email Gateway at that organization. The reality now is that if your emails are on O365, O365 offers you some form of Cisco Secure Email Cloud Gateway. For most organizations, they're looking for business justification to keep Cisco Secure Email Gateway when Microsoft, for example, is offering cloud protection for your mailboxes on O365. In a case like that, you really don't expand business on Cisco Secure Email Gateway. Now that mailboxes are no longer on-prem, and the cloud provider is offering you email security, the way they sell is that you cannot say have your email on the cloud without paying for cloud security. There is really not much expansion on Cisco Secure Email Gateway from a business standpoint, if your mailbox is with a cloud provider.

I would give Cisco Secure Email Gateway an eight out of ten. We didn't get any malware, but a few phishing emails, maybe one or two, slipped in. There is really no vendor, in my experience, that I would rate at ten out of ten.