Cisco Secure Email Reviews

Cisco Secure Email has strong inbound services. 

The solution does not have a strong outbound service. It should also integrate DLP. 

I have been working with the solution for five to six years. 

I rate the tool's stability seven to eight out of ten. 

I rate Cisco Secure Email's scalability a five out of ten. 

Cisco Secure Email's installation is neither difficult nor simple. I rate it a seven out of ten. The tool's deployment takes around an hour to complete. 

You need to look for more options before finalizing Cisco Secure Email. It does not get in touch with us regularly for feedback. I rate it a seven out of ten. 

We used Cisco Secure Email Gateway to filter spam. My overall experience with Cisco Secure Email Gateway was pretty good. No major issues were reported in my time. It worked fine for me.

One of the most valuable features would be the logs. There were detailed logs available. That was a seriously good feature. There were cases in which some spam mails penetrated through Cisco Secure Email Gateway; users reported that these were spam. The support was also good from Cisco. I got in touch with support and they helped us. It turns out these were actually spoof emails that came into our environment. I got to know about them from the log system. I was able to create a filter as a result.

For me, the ease of use was good. From the logs, from the configuration, from the monitoring perspectives, it was all good.

They could improve the filters. In my time at the company, there were several times we had to contact support to update the filters. They can definitely work more on that.

They can also work on the updating of the appliance. We had to do it once, when I was part of the engineering team. We had to update to a later version. It was complicated for me. I had to follow the instructions without understanding anything. Maybe there was pressure that caused me to not and understand them properly, but it was still complicated. The documentation was not there when we tried to update it. It may also have been due to my lack of experience. If I had done it twice or three times, I might have become accustomed to it and have done it more easily.

One to three years.

It was very stable. My experience with that version of it was really great. Apart from the improvement needed to the filters, it was all good.

We added one appliance to the platform and upgraded one to a newer version. The company did it quite easily. I was not part of that implementation, but the another guy told me that it was quite easy to do.

There were no plans to increase usage of it in that company at the time I was there. It was used by about 800 users and, since all of the users were using it and the organization was limited, everybody was already onboard. We had licenses for all of the users. It was all well designed from before. Apparently, they had to procure licenses for 200 to 300 more people, but that was after I left the organization. I didn't see what happened at that point.

Technical support was really good. There were two cases where we raised priority tickets and they responded well. They even helped us on Saturdays. Support was good.

When I got there, Cisco Secure Email Gateway was already implemented. We were only tuning it. Before my organization took over the operations for that bank, it was being taken care by someone else. I don't know what was implemented before that.

In terms of updating the appliance, once we set it up, it completed by itself. It was automatic mostly, but we took one night's worth of downtime. It completed in one to two hours. There were two people involved in doing the update.

We had a cluster set up, one to five devices, three in the DC and two in DR. It took only two people. For me, it was complicated. The other guy was very experienced on it. He had so much implementation experience on the appliance and he was able to guide me through it.

We did the DC first and failed over to the DR. Then we failed back and did the DR.

I don't know directly, but since there was nothing major that happened, I don't think the ROI was bad. What we're looking for is value. There should be no hampering of production and there was nothing like that, so the ROI should have been good.

Implementing it and support are good. Using it is also good. What remains is the technical expertise of the people who would be administering it. The thing you should have in mind when implementing it is that you have adequate resources, trained and skilled on this appliance so they can manage it. I was not that good. I was not that good with it at the time I started working on it. I had a few difficulties. I was lucky that nothing major happened during my time. Apart from that, the appliance itself was really good.

Considering the support and all the parameters I have talked about, I would give Cisco Secure Email Gateway a nine out of ten.

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 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.