What is our primary use case?
It's our primary, go-to product for email security. It covers our inbound and outbound mail. If somebody clicks on a bad link inside your company, it will automatically stop them from using that email to spread the rest of the phishing attempts. It checks outbound emails, not just inbound.
The solution is deployed on the cloud.
There are about 12 users in my organization.
If we get a new employee, we'll buy another license. Otherwise, we don't have plans to increase usage. It scales with the amount of staff that we have.
How has it helped my organization?
It doesn't matter from where you log in, you're going to go through the Barracuda gateway. It will protect and filter any incoming mail. There's also a sandboxing feature. If Barracuda picks up something that's a little bit fishy, it will detonate it in the sandbox.
If it's not malicious, it'll pass it on. If it is malicious, it'll just quarantine it. The nice thing is that sometimes Barracuda doesn't know if the mail is good or bad for you. It gives you the option to allow delivery or to block delivery of that particular kind of mail.
If someone is trying to send you mail but is being blocked by your gateway, you can go into your Barracuda portal, see the last mail that came in, and you can choose from different options: allow/don't allow, deliver, once only, block user, or whatever the case may be.
In some cases, we can also restrict it, but only the admin can do that. If you have a problem and one of your clients can't send you mail, you need to contact the admin IT manager and tell them that you're expecting mail from a certain email address but you've been blocked. He will then allow the delivery of that. It gives you control over what gets delivered to your end users from an IT manager's point of view.
What is most valuable?
Encryption is the most valuable feature. It creates an encryption tunnel from your location to the delivery address. It's like a tunnel that can't be broken so that your mail can't be intercepted anywhere along the line. When you're using Barracuda as a gateway, your mail is guaranteed to be delivered as it was sent.
The other nice thing about the solution is that it's an archiver, which most companies need for compliance.
For e-discovery, a lot of legal companies need certain documents and for emails to be kept intact as they were sent. It acts as a paper trail.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's pretty stable. It's older than Mimecast. The management tool is web-based, so it's also convenient.
It's managed on Barracuda Cloud Control. It covers spam, email viruses, email malware, phishing, undelivered mail, unsecured emails, and denial of service attacks. It's agentless and because it's an all-in-one product, it covers basically everything.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would rate the scalability as 10 out of 10.
How was the initial setup?
The difficulty of setup will depend on the number of users. It's scalable with the amount of users that you have. Setup with 1,000 users will obviously take longer than 10 users.
There is a labor cost involved in implementation. It takes about seven hours to deploy. There are a lot of different aspects involved in setup. It's not a simple implementation.
Once implemented, it's easy to maintain. Once the setup is done, it's fairly easy.
If you've given all your users rights, they can decide what mail comes through what doesn't. This makes an IT manager's job a lot easier. If you've kept the retention and everything needs to come through the admin or IT office but you send the alerts to the customer, then it's going to be pretty intensive depending on how many users you have.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The solution isn't the cheapest considering what you get. I would rate the pricing as seven out of ten.
The cost depends on what features you want. If you want to add advanced email security and compliance, advanced threat protection, cloud archiving services, and data loss protection, then there will be an additional cost.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate the solution as nine out of ten.
I would recommend complete compliance for most customers because it offers you email security services. It provides inbound and outbound scanning, blocking, and sandboxing.
It gives you data loss protection, encryption, and link and typosquatting protection. It also gives you advanced threat protection and cloud archiving services. That is all-in-one email protection.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: partner