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Cisco Secure Email vs Perception Point Advanced Email Security comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Defender for Offi...
Sponsored
Ranking in Email Security
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (10th)
Cisco Secure Email
Ranking in Email Security
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
Cisco Security Portfolio (8th)
Perception Point Advanced E...
Ranking in Email Security
16th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Internet Security (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is 15.8%, down from 20.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Email is 9.4%, down from 11.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Perception Point Advanced Email Security is 2.3%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Email Security
 

Featured Reviews

Jamie LeClair - PeerSpot reviewer
File-sharing options and ease of collaboration or meetings allow for quick collaborations and chats
I work in my company's IT department, so I use all of the products under Office 365 daily, including Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Teams, and all the other components in the product. My company can't make it through a day or go by without using the products offered under Office 365. Some of our manufacturing workers may use Office 365 a lot less, but it is still necessary for things like Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. I found Microsoft Teams to be the most valuable feature of the solution, along with all of the products and features offered under Office 365. My organization has remote workers, and we can't run the company without meetings organized with the help of Microsoft Teams.
Kostas Karidas - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps prevent security breaches but fails to improve in the area of AI
I have not noticed any impressive advanced threat protection mechanisms in the tool. I don't know if there are any AI features in the product. I don't know if there is any other technology embedded in the solution. Cisco Secure Email successfully mitigated potential email threats. My company has seen plenty of scenarios where Cisco Secure Email successfully mitigated potential email threats, spam emails, and fraudulent domains. The product is good for dealing with spam emails, and it can take care of more than 100 spam emails per day. A huge number of spam emails are monitored with the help of Cisco Secure Email. I would not recommend the product to other businesses because you need to have some kind of expertise in configuring and knowing a bit about the tool's GUI. The tool also lacks in the area of AI mechanics. If I would like to have an overview and review another solution, I would go for another product other than Cisco Secure Email. I can definitely suggest others to look at the product and review it, but I would also recommend that they compare it with the other solutions in the market. I wouldn't prioritize Cisco Secure Email over other tools. Either the support partner of the product or I take care of the tool's maintenance phase by looking into the configurations and doing some fine-tuning. I rate the tool a seven to eight out of ten.
Fabio Amorim Araujo - PeerSpot reviewer
Has good detection and response capabilities
The solution is very easy to use. We don't have any difficulty with transactions. Finding information, customizing configurations, and getting support or documentation is simple. I don't have any negative points to mention. I would recommend this solution to others. On a scale of one to ten, I'd give it a ten. It's amazing for us—the protection, the analysis time compared to Microsoft 365, and the pricing are all good. We're using both solutions—spam and protection channels. Recently, we presented two-week results to a customer, and they liked them and wanted to buy the solution. Our feedback is positive. We're developing a strategy to increase sales of the solution. When we deliver executive summaries to customers, we present good news about our company and discuss how Perception Point Advanced Email Security can help improve their security.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I would say that 90% of the spam and phishing attack emails get blocked right off the bat."
"Microsoft Defender has a feature to protect each and every attachment. Even if it's an encrypted attachment, it will check for any potential threats."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 has improved my organization's security. It makes it easier to manage the infrastructure without the help of third-party applications."
"Does a thorough job of examining email and URLs for malicious content."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is the ease of use."
"Some of the valuable features on the email side are anti-phishing, anti-malware, and Safe Links."
"The basic features are okay and I'm satisfied with the Defender."
"At the moment we are satisfied with this product. It's a stable, scalable, and resilient solution for us."
"It does a great job of preventing spam, malware, and ransomware. I can only go by what people have told me and what I've seen, but I have not seen spam in a year and a half to two years in my own company mailbox. And there are not a lot of catches where it's catching something that should have gotten through, either."
"The tool comes with AI features. It is good for clients who already use Cisco products due to integration."
"The solution works well."
"The solution is very configurable. It has enabled us to configure some specific filters to stop emails that general configurations didn't stop. It's a powerful solution. It can analyze a lot of emails simultaneously, with no problems of capacity or system load."
"The malicious URL scanning, as well as the anti-malware features, have been really useful for us in our environment."
"What I find the most valuable about Cisco Secure Email is that the logs are not that difficult to see even if you're not used to them. The logs are reasonably readable and diagnosing the problem is not too hard with them."
"It's flexible. There are a lot of rules and policies that can be easily applied for certain employees or certain mailboxes."
"We rely heavily on antivirus protection, email content filtering, and authentication mechanisms to ensure compliance with email security. Regarding phishing attempts, while phishing protection features are crucial, we also emphasize user education as a critical defence. The intelligence services Cisco provides, such as the Cisco Intelligence Center, play a significant role in analyzing and validating threats, including phishing attempts, in our email security practices."
"One is the hardware-assisted platform that provides more insight into the threat scenarios. And the other is their instant response team's availability, 24/7, for identifying and responding to incidents. These are the two main things that everyone likes."
"The most valuable feature of Perception Point Advanced Email Security is the filtering and securing of emails."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to identify malicious content and phishing emails and reduce the workload we have to do in terms of security."
"After integration, the tool is very easy to use. I had a problem with scripts for one customer, but my team did the integration for other customers without issues. So, I think I made a mistake in my integration. Both inline and API work fine."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the ones that are related to finding impersonation attacks and detecting attempts to steal credentials. In scenarios where attackers get you to follow URLs to a malicious site that looks similar to a good site, and then ask for the user credentials to try to steal them, it is very useful."
"Their security engines are very effective at stopping malware and potential attacks before they reach a user's mailbox. They have the best detection engine."
"The most valuable feature is the technical support services."
"We haven't had a client, who uses their protection, have an email security breach. That is the best thing about what they do. We don't have to think too much. Their product just works and keeps bad emails away."
 

Cons

"The XDR dashboard has room for improvement."
"One area for improvement is support, in terms of being able to reach them and, especially, technical support for configuration."
"The GUI is sometimes slow to fetch the device report and could be improved."
"It would be better if it were more scalable. It depends on the architecture, but we would like to make it more scalable for both data centers."
"The pre-sales cost calculations could be more transparent."
"I am generally satisfied with how it currently is. If I could improve anything, I would reduce the cost."
"The certification training for Defender for 365 needs to be deeper and incorporate Sentinel. I took all the security courses except one, and Sentinel isn't included."
"The custom alerts have to improve a lot."
"Better dashboards and more interactive overviews would be nice, but the current functionality is sufficient."
"The interface is dated. It has looked pretty much the same for 15 years or so. It would be helpful to be able to do everything from one spot. The centralized quarantine and reporting are completely separate from policy administration."
"I use the search all the time. Sometimes, it is hard to search for things and things are hard to find. People come to me all the time, saying, "This email didn't get through." Then, I go searching and don't find it on the first search. You have to think about alternative searches. I don't know if there is an easier way that they could help to find things. I don't know how they could simplify it, because now everybody else is using the cloud and everything is coming from Office 365, or whatever. It is just not the same environment from years ago where everybody had their own server and you could search easier."
"I would like to see sandboxing for email, where suspicious emails received by the system are analyzed through online services."
"I would rate the stability a six out of ten. We had multiple issues with the stability."
"We have occasionally had hardware problems because we are using an appliance-based solution, but that might change. We may consider going to virtual systems."
"The management features of the product are not up to date."
"The configuration UI should be made more intuitive. Currently, it takes a while to understand how to do the basic configurations."
"Its websites for analysis need to be a bit more approachable for people who are less technical. Technically, it is a fire-and-forget solution. So, you want to be able to implement this solution for a lot of companies who don't have security operation teams (SOCs) behind them. You need to have something where a secretary can jump onto this console and release whatever she needs to release. Therefore, it needs to be written in a very specific non-technical language."
"They could improve their anti-spam engine a little bit, because there are a lot of false positives. Sometimes, emails pass through their system but are spam. In terms of security and engines for malicious emails and antivirus, they're doing a good job. Their other engines can be improved."
"They can do better on the spam. Today, Perception Point is not our only solution. We have two solutions, and they are the second in line because the spam filtering is not yet the best."
"In terms of architecture, and I know that they're going to improve this, the solution needs to be much more redundant. There was an outage a month ago in AWS, and that basically stopped the service for two or three hours. Although in two years, this was the first time that something like that happened, our expectation from a company like Perception Point is that it should work with either a multi-cloud or multi-region architecture, to improve the resilience."
"I think the interface could be improved in the next release."
"They just don't do a good job of promoting themselves. They seem like a typical busy IT company who is just working on fixing problems and making technology better. However, they are not fantastic at marketing themselves to existing partners, which is not a bad thing. It is just something for improvement."
"Email alerts should be available in real-time."
"It would be helpful for Perception Point Advanced Email Security to have more integration with other solutions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is normal. Considering its popularity, it's not overpriced."
"The license is expensive because the cost is based on the number of users."
"The solution could be better by simplifying the business model of their licensing. It was hard to figure out how to get the licensing done for the environment, initially."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is an add-on to the Office license. Many customers are purchasing this solution."
"For licensing, it's usually a yearly package for customers who are subscribed to Office 365, but they can also pay on a monthly basis."
"Defender is a little bit more expensive as compared to others. We are in the manufacturing environment. So, we don't have a high budget for all of our endpoint devices. Its cost is a major concern for us."
"The pricing has become expensive."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 comes with Microsoft Windows. It is free with the operating system."
"The licensing was all transferred."
"We do annual licensing for Cisco Secure Email Gatewayand SMA together, and possibly SmartNet support. Packaged together, the cost is just under $38,000."
"I don't have the insights into it, but compared to different products, it seems to have a medium level of pricing."
"Licensing costs depend on how many users there are. It could range between $5 and $7 per month, per user."
"It is a relatively expensive option compared to other alternatives."
"It is an expensive product. I rate its pricing an eight or nine."
"Compared to Cisco's on-prem service, the cost is the same, but you don't have to pay for the hardware and you don't have to maintain the system, as far as upgrades and hardware failures are concerned. It is cheaper to operate on their cloud service than it is to operate with their on-prem service."
"It is not that costly. We pay for the solution through a contractor and pay an annual fee."
"The pricing was fair in comparison with the other solutions. We have received good value for what we paid."
"In Brazil, the dollar price affects the cost. Perception Point Advanced Email Security is about 50 percent less expensive."
"There is room for improvement for them with an MSP partner. The pricing is good and fair. Our customers don't complain. The only thing is that it's a little bit old school. They don't have a system that automatically checks the number of users that our customers have so we can just update the licenses ourselves through a website. It is still done manually. They have a person who checks invoicing monthly to determine if there have been any changes. A nice improvement would be if they could get automated licensing counts."
"The price of the solution is high."
"It fits every budget. It has a low price. I can't go ahead and sell it for any price I want. They are quite strict. They say, "This is the price that you can sell it for and this is the price for you as a reseller." That is it. It is not a lot of money. I will not become rich from it, but I like that they keep a standard for everyone. They are a fair company."
"The pricing is not cheap, but I can see the value. In security, if you are trying to save by giving up quality, that's a very bad decision."
"We were able to get reasonable pricing that matches the ROI we want, so I think that it is the correct price point."
"If a user only wants protection for email, then the price of the product is okay, but if they opt for the collaboration options offered by the product, then it becomes a little expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
5%
Computer Software Company
15%
Retailer
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
Threat Explorer is an invaluable tool for me, and it plays a crucial role in helping me discern the origins of variou...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
The pricing is reasonable since it comes integrated with our Office 365 license.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
Microsoft needs to broaden its global support presence by establishing teams of subject-matter experts in all regions.
What do you like most about Cisco Secure Email?
Cisco Secure Email is a budget-friendly solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Email?
The licensing is expensive and a bit complex with the new approach Cisco has taken. It is considered more complicated...
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Email?
The primary areas for improvement are the pricing and the complexity of deployment. The pricing is considered expensi...
What do you like most about Perception Point Advanced Email Security?
The most valuable feature is the technical support services.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Perception Point Advanced Email Security?
In Brazil, the dollar price affects the cost. Perception Point Advanced Email Security is about 50 percent less expen...
What needs improvement with Perception Point Advanced Email Security?
To improve the solution, maybe a portal for end users to consult their emails would be helpful. The end user could ac...
 

Also Known As

MS Defender for Office 365
Cisco Email Security, IronPort, Cisco Email Security, ESA, Email Security Appliances
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is trusted by companies such as Ithaca College.
SUNY Old Westbury, CoxHealth, City of Fullerton, Indra
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Secure Email vs. Perception Point Advanced Email Security and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.