Cisco Secure Email Reviews

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.

Our company was facing a problem of user complaints with network performance despite the fact that we used Cisco ASA and Cisco IPS. When we scanned the mail server with antivirus we found a lot of threats that couldn't be treated, so we need to use IronPort. Cisco IronPort mail security was very helpful by blocking threats, viruses, worms and Trojans from attacking the mail accounts and user PCs.

-Added cost and delay to the network traffic, but performance did remain stable. -Requires knowledge and operation time to manage an added security device to the network devices besides IPS and ASA.

Cisco IronPort is Cisco's new network access controller (NAC). Cisco IronPort email and web security products are used online with the firewall Cisco ASA and Cisco IPS to filter attacks, threats, phishing and data loss.

• Cost-effective since they do not require extra hardware • They are simple to plug into the available network • Protection of mail channel works well regardless of the email client used • Efficient to troubleshoot

• Requires several actions to employ rules • It takes time to harmonize information from the email log events with higher level reporting tools

Security risks presented by web-based malware, spyware and web traffic exposes organizations to compliance and productivity dangers introduced by improper usage of the web within the organization. IronPort allows visibility into the problem and an easy way to pinpoint policy offenders. It includes a user friendly interface and easy content incorporation, filtering and reporting infrastructure.