What advice do you have for others considering Cisco Secure Email?

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Cisco Secure Email may incorporate AI capabilities, but I'm not directly familiar with its implementation in threat detection. I would rate it as a nine out of ten due to its effectiveness, reliability, and value for investment.

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.

It was not difficult to integrate Cisco Secure Email with other products in our infrastructure, but it has many complicated options. Sometimes, we need to go to the command line to check the debugging. The solution's DLP (data loss prevention) feature is partially for compliance. DLP needs a full-fledged solution with the agent implementation. Until the agent is not there, you cannot implement DLP. The solution's email encryption feature works fine. Cisco Secure Email is not a single platform. The engineer has to be a little technical to understand the command line, which is different from the firewall. There are different types of command lines. You have to check the mail log using different command lines. Overall, I rate the solution eight and a half out of ten.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. The DLP feature in the product is not a functionality that we have configured yet, but we do have access to its settings. A beginner can learn to use Cisco Secure Email through a straightforward process. Cisco Secure Email has integrated with our company's existing email gateway in a very straightforward manner through a configuration process involving IronPorts, and then URLs on IronPorts are set up. Though it is easy to set up the product, the cost of the solution is not favorable for everybody. I rate the tool a seven out of ten.

I rate the overall product a seven to eight out of ten.

Overall, I would rate it seven out of ten.

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Cisco is an integrated solution. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

I rate Cisco Secure Mail a nine out of ten. Cisco is improving. We had a session where we asked them to improve their GUI. They have improved it and the end-user experience because it was too mechanical a dashboard earlier, where it was difficult to find mail logs. We recommend the solution. We use Umbrella for our DNS layer security, blocking all the DNS layer threats. For endpoint security, we are using Cisco Amp. Whenever there is a requirement, we hunt for greenfield opportunities where no Cisco solution is present. We can then create a window where we can reach in. We deploy one product and then explain the single vendor advantages to customers. That mostly goes with the Cisco Umbrella, which goes hand in hand with Meraki. Once the user gets his ecosystem on Cisco, giving a single vendor solution is possible. Similarly, XDR is there. XDR is one of the key products we're pitching these days. It's a simple single glass pane where we can orchestrate all the customer's products from a single dashboard. That's a major concern we hear these days from security personnel and IT teams. They have several products from several OEMs, and whenever it comes to orchestration or finding a glitch, they have to access all the products independently on different tabs or screens. As far as policies and security with the components are concerned, Cisco is the perfect product.

I recommend Cisco Secure Email and rate it a ten out of ten.

I would give Cisco Secure Firewall an eight out of ten. We're expecting that with later versions of software, again, more features will become available. We have approximately 2000 employees and we sell a variety of Cisco solutions and products.

Cisco Secure Email is easy-to-use. I highly recommend it and rate it an eight out of ten.

I recommend Cisco Secure Email to those planning to use it. Around 40 administrators are required for maintenance. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

I rate Cisco Secure Email a ten out of ten. The solution performs effectively and accomplishes its intended purpose better than anything else I have encountered. I do not subscribe to the Cisco Secure Email end-to-end model, but I have witnessed its effectiveness in action. It works exceptionally well for securing the infrastructure from end to end and aids in detecting and mitigating threats. If an organization has the budget for Cisco Secure Email, I would not give another solution a second thought. We have been using this solution for 15 years and have not explored other options. Recently, we migrated our email to Exchange Online, but we chose to retain Cisco's defenses instead of relying on Microsoft's cloud Exchange Online Protection. We decided to stick with Cisco because I would have needed to replicate the policies from my Cisco investment in Microsoft, and I lack the resources to do so. Additionally, I wasn't confident in Microsoft's ability to match Cisco's performance in the security field at that time. I didn't observe the same level of quality in security and spam filtering with Microsoft. Cisco was setting the standard while Microsoft was still trying to catch up.

To those evaluating Cisco Secure Email, I'd advise thinking about what do you need and what is most important for your company in terms of stability and the administration area. Based on my experience, I'd rate Cisco Secure Email a nine out of ten.

To those evaluating this solution, I'd recommend trying the product. Cloud solutions are very easy to use, and you can do a PoC. In a matter of hours or a day, you can deploy the solution and use it fully. We are Cisco partners. Cisco has a very nice solution and a very good security team in Portugal, but obviously, they can't cater to all the customers. An integrator does that part. With the relationship that we have with the customers, we can apply and customize the solutions that Cisco has in its portfolio according to the environment and specific needs of each customer. Our partnership with Cisco is pretty close to a 10 out of 10 because we are getting different kinds of solutions. We at S21sec handle just security. We don't do storage, and we don't do servers. We are very focused on security, and the partnership that we have with Cisco is ever-growing because nowadays, for instance, OT solutions are also a very huge concern for us, and what we have seen with Cisco solutions that are being brought to the market is that they also started to handle the new security issues that we find in other sectors. They are not only into IT. They are also going into the OT and the IoT world. They are able to customize and bring new solutions, even some developed insights, by buying other companies and adapting them to the Cisco reality. They are able to devise a product that handles the needs of different kinds of customers in different areas of the business, not just the IT world but also the industrial world. I would rate Cisco Secure Email a nine out of ten. It's growing up to be much more than just an email protection tool. It's going for the awareness of the customers, and that's a good complementary solution that addresses other problems that come from using email nowadays.

I would rate Cisco Secure Email an eight out of ten.

When it comes to preventing phishing and business-email compromise, in the last year the efficacy has been improved. For four or five years this solution didn't work as well, but last year and this year we have seen that with every new version, the efficacy is there, and the solution is working better and better. Our customers are happy to use it. It has made a great impression in this area. Similarly, regarding spam, malware, and ransomware, in the last few years the solution was not so good but there was not so much malware. However, these days, the email solution from Cisco does a real good job of preventing malware. About half of our customers use Office 365. A lot of customers, if they are migrating to Office 365 from an on-premises Exchange server, choose to increase their security with Cisco. The combination of Cisco Secure Email and Office 365 is working very well. Since this migration to Office 365 started, over the last two to three years, we have had no complaints from our customers. We have trusted Cisco's email security for eight or nine years and we are going to use it in the future. We recommended it to our customers. We are happy with how it works, with the stability, features, and functions.

It is not so difficult to us, but neither is it easy, particularly if you don't have some knowledge about email. Whatever you are looking for with an email security appliance or device, you mostly have it, though nobody is perfect. The solution’s ability to prevent phishing and business-email compromise is fairly good. DKIM, DMARC, and SPF integration are the best way to prevent phishing, spoofing, etc. However, they still have room to work in this area.

It's a very mature product. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

It is stable and credible. I would always tell someone else to try it out. Of course, before you try it out, you can look at what Gartner is saying. Gartner has always placed the Cisco Email Security Appliance up there along with Mimecast and other top players. It is well-secured. Security is everyone's concern, so I will always tell people to go for it. It is very secure. Its pricing has been a little bit high, but you can always ask for a discount from your account managers, country manager, or whoever is in charge in your region. I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.

For the future, we are looking at moving to newer versions that allow for additional advanced phishing protection. That's something that we're targeting. Also, we're trying to figure out how to streamline our mail flow with the majority of our inbound and outbound email that is now flowing through Office 365. Essentially, we're figuring out how we can tighten up that integration and lessen our dependence on on-premises Exchange for our mail flow. With respect to versioning, it is controlled by Cisco. I believe that version 13.5 is when they introduced the advanced phishing protection. We're notified when new versions are released and we can ask for earlier versions, but we get adopted once those versions become generally available. My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to leverage the Cisco Validated Design (CVD) documents that exist. They're super helpful. Cisco has done a lot of work with Microsoft in figuring out integrations and documenting those. There is quite a bit of really good documentation, both within Microsoft and Cisco on building those integrations and configuring them. We have also leveraged Cisco's adoption services around renewal times to make sure that we're using the platform to the fullest extent. They offer health checks for their hosted solutions, so on a yearly basis, you can sit down with an engineer and walk through and make sure you're on a good version of the code. You can make sure that you've again implemented from a high level, those feature sets correctly, and that you're leveraging things properly. Cisco does a lot of things to make sure that it's an easy renewal conversation to have, specifically with leadership. The biggest lesson that I have learned from working with this product is to make sure that you're engaged with your Cisco teams to guarantee that you're getting the most benefit out of the platform. Again, you should be taking advantage of the health check services and adoption services because they're really unique. In summary, this is a good solution but I think there's always room for improvement. I don't think that anything is perfect and they've definitely got some work to do on tightening up the UI and the configuration presentation. From a functionality perspective, the platform is great. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

There wasn't much of a learning curve involved in migrating from Cisco’s on-prem to Cloud Email Security because they are very similar. There were just a few things that were different. It is a good product. Be prepared to invest time in learning it, like anything. You need to have somebody who is a key administrator, like any enterprise-level product that you would bring in. Even if you will have Salesforce or whatever, you need to have an administrator who knows how to keep it running. Email threats just keep getting worse and worse, so you need to keep on your toes. I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).

Don't have an organization that doesn't have this sort of protection in place. If I was to be in another organization, and they didn't have this sort of protection, I would definitely be advocating that they get something in very quickly. Don't hesitate: The benefits are there. It can be seen as being a large cost. However, if you've ever had any instances where you've been affected by malware or CryptoLocker, there are a number of things that you should be doing as an organization: perimeter email security, DNS protection, and removing USB access on devices. These are probably the top three things that I'd be advising people to do. We don't use Office 365 (which is now Microsoft 365) at the moment, but it's something that we are looking at. Being a large hospital, we're looking at aligning ourselves with our Department of Health so Office 365 is something that we will be using that to a certain extent. However, we would still be using Cisco Secure Email Cloud Gateway if we did move to that. We would deliver emails from Cisco Secure Email Cloud Gateway into Office 365. That way, we would still have the security. That's how I've set it up at previous organizations: Going from Cisco Secure Email Cloud Gateway into Office 365, delivering to our on-prem Exchange Server, and then onto our users. The amount of traffic that it stops is massive. I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

Take Cisco up on the offer to walk you through the implementation. It's not that it's a necessity, but it certainly gives you a good feeling, when you're done, that you've covered all your bases. It gave me a good feeling that we covered this and we covered that and they showed me where things were. They give you a copy of the recording where you were on with them and went through everything. You can go back and watch it again later to review it. The same thing is true with their reviews every nine to 12 months. They record them and send you a copy of the recording so you can go back and look at it. Take them up on that and be willing to sit there and just ask pertinent questions and make sure you understand as you go through it. As far as the threat assessment analysis goes, what they analyze is what that the appliance decides to send them. That is part of the way it works. When it thinks it has found something and it's not certain, it sends that to Talos first. We don't even know it happened. They get a chance to review it and make a decision of yes or no: this should be stopped or we should go ahead and let it through. We have not leveraged anything other than that from the Talos threat management. We lean on them to help us make sure the right things come through. There have been several times that I have gotten an email as an administrator — you get these emails about statuses — that says, "This has been quarantined in the cloud until we can make a decision," and it will hold it. And once they make the decision, it either stops it or lets it go. Something else that we're going to begin this year is a training solution to help our users understand what to look for. I would give Cisco Email Security a nine out of ten. I would give it a 10 if it had a more intuitive interface and the artificial intelligence so we didn't have to do some of that manual stuff.

I would recommend to use Cisco Email Security first as your email filtering solution, but do not rely on it as your only solution. I like the product because it is very easy to work with or we can make it complex if we want.

This is a great product with wonderful support. You won't have any issues.

Having a good understanding of the product helps in the implementation process, so do some upfront training before you adopt the product. Be closely involved with Cisco support or the Cisco implementation team which will help to make sure that configuration is well adjusted and suited to your company. I've used the product for more than ten years. Prior to that, it was IronPort. Cisco bought IronPort. We were using the IronPort products before Cisco bought them. We're currently using AsyncOS version 12. We've used this product for so long, and we've been very happy with it, that we do not have a direct comparison against other products that are available today. That said, and accepting the fact that email security systems are not cheap, this product is still a front-runner and, combined with the new things that Cisco is doing, it has a lot of scope and capability. I would suggest this product would be about a nine, if ten is the best.

My advice would be to have a very good partner because Cisco will not be proactive in helping and educating you. They will do proactively health check on their device but they don't offer education/training free to the customers like other vendors do. It has a complex UI and configuration menu but the product works well, both in terms of security and performance.

In retrospect, I would probably want to talk to someone like myself. I'm now using Cisco security appliances and I can see how someone like me in another agency would benefit from talking to me about: "Hey what do you see? How's it going? What have your experiences been with the product?" If you can, find someone who is actually using it and talk to them. In addition, it really depends on where you're coming from. The learning curve is going to be there regardless, because it's a new product. But if you're coming from a smaller email security platform up to this one, the learning curve is going to be steep. You may actually want to invest the time and the money into some additional training. Don't neglect that because if you just try to rely on Cisco support you're going to notice pretty consistent slowdowns. If that's okay, then it won't be an issue. Of course, it's always okay until something urgent comes up. If you're trained up, you can handle it yourself. Nobody knows everything, but it's in your best interest to know as much as possible.

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.

So far, so good. IronPort was fantastic. It's an awesome solution, but I don't think it's something for a small-sized organization due to the licensing cost. I think it's a great solution for email security. I would rate Cisco Secure Email Gateway at eight out of ten because of the awesome functionality and features. The only downside with it is the knowledge about it. When I was trying to enable cloud encryption services on it, allowing you to encrypt emails to send confidential emails to a third-party, the resources on that were not that grounded and the technology was somewhat difficult to configure. The way the technology works for email encryption services is not ideal because once you send an email to someone, he has to click on a link and be redirected to a web portal, rather than having everything done on his email platform.

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.

There is no totally comprehensive solution in cybersecurity. I find Cisco Email Security to be comprehensive, but it's not 100 percent. There is no silver-bullet solution when it comes to cybersecurity. You better keep on adding protection layers to your network. Don't think you're not going to be a target. As a small or medium business, you will be targeted. It's so easy to get through a firewall nowadays. One layer of cybersecurity is not going to do it. You need to add two, three, four layers. It's just like going to the airport. The first thing you see is the check-in desk. They check who you are, that you have valid credentials, where you're going and why. Then you go through the scanners. Then you go through another layer of security. Once you get through, you're also being watched to make sure that you don't become "malicious." There are a lot of layers. I would rate the solution at nine out of ten. What comes to mind when giving it that rating is ease of use. Just set it and go. A better UI would make it a ten.

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.

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

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.

This product is the complete solution and the real deal. I am using the on-premise version.

Give it a chance. If you can do a proof of concept somehow to rate it against other competitors which are out there, look into it because it is a good product. I haven't upgraded to version 12 yet.