Cisco Secure Email Reviews

We started using Cisco Secure Email because we had a lot of junk emails, phishing, and things like that. We wanted to secure the email sites for the end users.

It has had an impact on the awareness of the employees. Previously, a lot of employees were complaining about junk emails, phishing, etc. After using Cisco Secure Email, spam, and other things have been reduced drastically. I'm not sure how it filters them out, but it just learns based on the email subject and other factors. It just filters them and sends them to the junk box. There is an add-on, and if you think that an email is suspicious, you just add it to the add-on or move it to the junk box.

It saves time. Previously, we had to filter the emails and see which ones are junk and if it has been reported or not. There was a daily checking of the mailboxes to see what was going on and what had been blocked, but with Cisco Secure Email, all of that is just in one tab. You see all the emails that have been blocked and the reason they have been blocked. It saves a lot of time for us. It does the job that we need it to do. 

It's flexible. There are a lot of rules and policies that can be easily applied for certain employees or certain mailboxes.

If you are not a technical guy, it is hard to maneuver, but as soon as you work on it, it gets better and better. If there was a better way to know how to do things or how to find things, it would be good.

We have been using Cisco Secure Email for two and a half to three years.

It's stable. We haven't had any issues with it.

After moving from Exchange to Office 365, we thought that we needed to upgrade the license or do a couple of changes, but it was already a part of the plan from the product itself. So, it was easily scalable.

We didn't have to contact them. Our partner did all the jobs that were needed. It was part of the AMC, and since they set it up, it needed just a couple of tweaks when we shifted from Exchange to Office 365. All the support has always been through the partner. Our experience with them has been good. 

Based on my knowledge, its implementation was fast, and there were no issues when it was implemented.

We did a couple of PoC, and it was leading at that time in the market. We compared it to Barracuda and a couple of others. Its ability had set it apart from others. The partner was good, and the PoC was on point. It did what needed to be done. 

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

All of our inbound and outbound emails flow through the CES environment and we leverage it for spam filtering, phishing filtering, malicious URL detection, attachment scanning, and data leak protection. It basically covers all of the security layers for email.

It's cut down quite a bit on the amount of false-positive spam that we get. The spam engine that's utilized by CES, we found to be pretty effective. It's rare that things end up in a quarantine when they aren't supposed to be there, which is very beneficial. I believe that was one of the reasons that we moved from the previous hosted solution that we were utilizing to CES.

The malicious URL scanning, as well as the anti-malware features, have been really useful for us in our environment. Specifically, the URL scanning has helped to knock down quite a few phishing attempts that come into the organization. The broader blanket automated attempts get knocked down pretty quickly since those URLs typically get flagged early on, and then the appliance just picks up on those URLs and knocks them down. It is the same with malicious attachments. The malware scanning that's done via AMP, which is deployed elsewhere in the organization as well, just grabs all of that before it hits the inboxes.

We have our email security feeding into the SecureX solution and it's nice to have all of our security platform statistics in one place. We leverage quite a bit of the Cisco security stack and having all of that feed into the SecureX dashboard is great. The dashboard continues to evolve, but it is at least nice to be able to see everything at once.

Integrating this product with SecureX was pretty quick and easy. Both of the solutions are cloud-hosted and the SMA, which is the reporting module that feeds the data into SecureX, was done via the API. The documentation on the SecureX portal walks you through exactly how to add the various integrations.

We leverage the AMP functionality that exists in CES, and it also ties into threat response, which is the threat-hunting platform that Cisco has. The benefits of these integrations were pretty important in the decision to stay within the Cisco product family. The threat hunting and threat response are really nice because we're able to see if something malicious makes it into the environment. Once that happens, we are able to trace that back and find out if that was done via an email, and then grab the information for that specific message. This will tell us if there have been any other indications of compromise on any other hosts. When it comes to being able to do that, having it all in a uniform environment is pretty important.

The UI is definitely one area of improvement because it doesn't match other interfaces and the navigation can be a little clunky. Generally speaking, it is just dated, and I know that they're working on enhancing it for later versions.

They should continue to develop their integration with Office 365 or Hosted Exchange since a lot of organizations, ours included, are moving primary Exchange services to the Microsoft Cloud. Being able to integrate tighter with that environment is important.

I have been using Cisco Secure Email since joining the company.

We haven't had any issues at all with the stability of the platform.

With it being cloud-hosted, it can scale as wide as you need to.

We have roughly 1,000 employees and all of our inbound and outbound emails go through this system. This means that there are several tens of thousands of messages a day flowing through it. We haven't had any sort of performance issues at all with our environment.

Cisco's technical support is very good. We've just recently had a couple of tech cases that we needed help with. We were researching why some of our partner's messages weren't getting through intact. Because this is a hosted solution and they have quite a bit of visibility, it has always been great.

We've never had any issues with support on this platform.

In previous organizations, we've leveraged Postini, which was a cloud-based solution that was acquired by Google. I've also worked in environments that have leveraged Microsoft's Office 365 email spam filtering, and they've been good, but generally, usability is sometimes a problem. It goes back to the UI and then the accuracy.

The amount of spam that is stopped has not always been great. As such, I feel that CES has a pretty good balance in that regard.

As this solution is hosted on Cisco's cloud, we don't manage the underlying infrastructure.

We probably have about eight individuals who work with it. Some of them are within our support organization, there are messaging or Exchange admins, and there are network engineers.

Return of investment is something that is difficult to measure because you're essentially trying to prove a negative. It is difficult to say what it has prevented or what has been stopped from happening. That said, I think the overall satisfaction, at least from the user perspective, is good.

When you consider the spam and anti-phishing components, in addition to the IT benefit of the anti-malware and antivirus, I think we definitely get an appropriate return. Nobody questions the expenditure on the solution as being ineffective.

With respect to transferring policies and licenses, Smart Licensing has really improved the overall licensing model for Cisco. We've been really happy with Smart Licensing.

There are additional fees for adding features. For example, things like AMP are additional licenses. Because it's all done via the Smart Licensing portal, when new licenses are acquired they're dropped in our bucket, so to speak, and then the solution just grabs those licenses. There is no back and forth required. The license ends up in the bucket and then the solution syncs with Smart Licensing and we're good to go.

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.

The big use case is filtering inbound messages for spam and malicious messages. Obviously, it's a huge issue for everyone to keep as much of that stuff out as possible.

Users are getting a lot fewer malicious and nuisance messages. When we moved to the cloud product, we added in a service for graymail unsubscribe which we didn't have before. That makes it very easy for people to safely unsubscribe from mailing lists, especially the sort that they have been added to without knowing what the company is. That has reduced the amount of time users waste going through that process and the amount of time IT has to spend responding to questions about what they can do about things like that. In general, it's enabled us to spend less time addressing user issues regarding junk mail. It has also been better about not blocking legitimate messages, which again comes down to saving time for both users and IT.

The migration from the on-prem email security to its cloud email security saved us money, versus where we would have been if we had kept the on-prem with them. Versus the Microsoft service, it was basically a wash. But 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. The hardware savings are from whatever level of hardware we ended up not having to buy. If we had stayed on-prem with it, we would have needed to buy two new appliances that year, appliances which would have cost $10,000 or $12,000. I don't have a good figure on how much manpower we spent maintaining upgrades with the on-prem. It wasn't huge, but we probably save an hour a month, on average, on maintenance.

For maintenance, it depends on what's going on, but there may be a few hours a month for reviewing, reporting, and for addressing any user issues. User issues mainly revolve around things like, "Okay, the user hasn't gotten an email from so-and-so. Check and see whether or not they've got it." But as far as actually maintaining it, to ensure it keeps functioning, it's pretty minimal; maybe an hour a month. The people who handle the maintenance are from our infrastructure group, which is a combination of systems and network functions.

A few of the big features are ones that we found that we missed terribly when we moved over to Microsoft. One of them is simply the logging that they have in the reporting. For example, if I wanted to get logs about emails since last week, from a certain address, with native Office 365 I would have to submit the search requests and I would get an email a few hours later with the results. With Cisco, it's not only a lot more detailed information, but it's nearly instantaneous. So if you have to do any sort of research into an issue, whether it's security or something is missing, it makes that much less labor intensive.

The filtering is definitely better at catching both spam and malicious messages, and there's a lot of extremely granular ability for setting up rules. You can do it the way you want to. The Microsoft solution tends to be pretty limited in how it allows some of that to be done. It forces you into doing it a certain way, even if it's not good for your business process.

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.

We used it consistently from 2007 to the beginning of 2020, and when we went off of it, it was about three months before we started back up with the cloud option.

We haven't had any stability issues with it. It seems to be good.

I haven't seen any scalability issues. I'm not quite sure how scaling would be handled if we had a truly immense increase, but I haven't seen any challenges with it. We're on the small side so we may not be a good example.

We don't really intend to change our usage much. We use it for all of our inbound and outbound email.

I haven't talked with their technical support much in the last few years. The only issue I've had was a support case for getting command-line access set up. That was fine, but there was virtually no contact about it.

We have had two runs with Cisco Secure Email. We initially ran it on-prem and that started in 2007. It was the same year, or a little bit before, Cisco bought the old IronPort product. And last year, we initially ended up dropping the on-prem, when we were moving into Office 365. Although we were happy with it, the thought was, "Okay, if we move everything to Office 365, Microsoft can handle that. We have their full-blown mail filtering products." We thought it would probably save us some workload, not having an extra product to deal with.

The intent was that we were going to consolidate to a single product when we moved to the cloud for email, and we found out that it didn't work as well as we had expected. We didn't do a direct conversion from the on-prem to the cloud solution. There were a couple of months between it during which we tried the Microsoft option.

We then found out that they were not nearly as good as one would expect from a market leader in corporate email. I then contacted Cisco about what it would cost to do it in the cloud with their products. I was rather surprised to find out that they don't charge anything more to host it, than they do to have you run it on your own equipment. We ended up jumping back into it with their hosted solution, without really planning to. When the cost came back and was as attractive as it was, we decided, "Okay, this Microsoft filtering is not working out. Let's go back to Cisco." We went back to it and it's been working really well, better than it did when it was on-prem, because we don't have to maintain as much of it.

We had been using encryption on Cisco before, but we did end up leaving that with Microsoft, just because it integrates with their Outlook browser better. I'm at something of a toss-up on which one I prefer. Because the Microsoft solution integrates directly with the Outlook client, it is a bit easier for users to manage. But the encryption on it seems to work fairly decently, although it has the same problem that all of them do. There are tons of standards for that. Everyone has their own. It would be great if there was some sort of multi-vendor standard for that but, without it, we moved it over to the Microsoft solution and that seemed that to be a little easier for users.

Because we had those few months in between, we didn't qualify for a license transfer. We had let the initial service lapse and then we brought on the cloud service.

It ended up being a really easy setup for the Cisco cloud product. I was pleasantly surprised how much was already ready for you out-of-the-box.

I found the setup to be straightforward, as someone who was familiar with the management environments. If I had not had the experience with it, there would have been areas that could use more documentation to explain what different sections of the product do. But I had been using it for a long time, so that was not an issue. But I could see that is an area they could put more into. We also had a technical contact available to us for when getting started, to whom we could reach out. But it would be good to add in some more entry-level documentation.

As far as the policy setup goes, our equipment was end-of-life and we weren't at a version that we could migrate from. So we decided to do greenfield for the setup and we're actually happy we did because Cisco's default setup on its cloud product, when they brought up a new blank instance for us, had a really good framework for rules, et cetera. We copied in exception lists and the like from our existing setup and we were up and running in an afternoon.

When we went in, we initially did it as a trial, because they offered a 30- or 60-day trial. We did that to see if this was what we wanted to do. We ended up poking around in the environment a little bit first, because the whole thing was an unbudgeted change for us. When we moved over to Microsoft we found we were having all these issues. We put some resources into trying to resolve them but we saw there were deficiencies in Office 365, when it comes to the filtering of email. We started the trial with Cisco to see if going back to them and their cloud would solve things. We liked what we saw and decided to move everything over. The grass really was greener on that side.

The downtime involved in the migration from Cisco's on-prem solution to the cloud email security was minimal, about 15 minutes. The downtime aspect wasn't especially important since we did it after hours. It's emails, so it's not like anybody was going to notice that it was down for that amount of time.

The learning curve involved in migrating from the on-prem to the cloud email security was pretty easy. The environment really is very similar to manage in the cloud. If you look at the management consoles that you're used to seeing on-prem, and you look at the ones in the cloud, about 99 percent is the same. There are some things that are unavailable because Cisco is handling the software upgrades, but almost all of it that you had on-prem is the same. There are a few extra steps to getting into the command line, they're a little bit weird, but all the policies are identical to the on-prem method. There's not much learning curve involved in switching.

Overall, the migration was massively easier than I expected it to be. We did it on a Sunday afternoon and it only took about three hours.

We were in touch with the technical contact from Cisco for some basic stuff, for getting started.

We were just evaluating between Cisco and Microsoft's advanced threat protection.

We decided not to evaluate anyone else when we saw that Cisco was going to be less expensive than we thought it was going to be. My expectation going in was that the cloud service would cost more than the licensing for on-prem would, because they're hosting it. But that wasn't actually the case. It ended up costing about the same as what the on-prem cost, except that we didn't have to buy hardware anymore, which obviously saves some money.

It's definitely worth looking at Cisco's cloud email security offering. It's surprisingly simple to get going with, and it really is easier to use than the on-prem because of everything they have built into it. It is surprisingly cost-effective.

It's integrated with their AMP product, although that's sold as a part of it. We haven't integrated it with other Cisco stuff at the moment. We've got third-party stuff that we have it integrated with. 

We are using it for our email gateway security for all our inbound and outbound email. We use a lot of the URL filtering and spam filtering as well as the dictionaries, e.g., if they try to spoof employee names.

We didn't have an email gateway initially. As spam was ramping up, the junk was getting through. So, we needed a gateway. We then worked with a local company who sold us this product and some training as well as how to get it up and running, configuring it. Over the years, they have been constantly changing it.

We use a lot of their search features to search for emails that have come through. Our end users come through it. They say, "This didn't email didn't arrive," or "How did this email get through?" So, I am constantly searching through message tracing and using that all the time.

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.

When you run a trace and you are in the cloud, it's harder. You run a trace and it generates trace results. I haven't figured out how to get those off of the cloud. I don't know if there is a path to open up a ticket on that.

Before it was purchased by Cisco, we had already been using IronPort since 2005 or earlier.

It is very stable. We have never had any problems.

The way we are using it now, it does require maintenance. I decided to take a zero trust for URL links coming in emails or unknown links. Then, if there is a link that somebody wants to get through, then I have to add that to the list to allow it. So, there are some dictionaries and things to maintain the way we are running it now that we didn't have in the past. For many years, we got it running, then forgot about it. It just ran and ran. Now, I think it is just a different environment due to the level of phishing emails, etc. 

The way that we are running it now, there is more to maintain, like the dictionaries and the list of employees, so somebody doesn't spoof an employee's name. It takes maybe an hour or so a week to update the dictionaries and things like that. 

Right now, I'm the only one maintaining it.

The scalability is good. It seems like it still has capacity in the cloud. It is hard to tell in the cloud. However, the ones that we had on-prem were running real close to their limit for whatever reason: memory swapping and CPU utilization. So, we had to do something there. Right now, it seems like there is capacity/room to grow.

The solution protects 450 users. We plan to gradually increase users.

They have always been good when helping with problems. They are responsive and always come up with an answer.

We migrated from Cisco ESA to Cisco Cloud Email Security. 

The appliances were getting close to the end of life. They were using a lot of CPU, so it was time to do something with them. IT management seems to be going more to the cloud now, so it made sense to go to the Cisco Cloud solution. The machines that we had on-prem were really slow. For whatever reason, they were getting real slow. When we went to the cloud, we got away from that problem.

For the initial deployment, we might have spent a week getting it up and running. Then, we went for a day or two to training.

There wasn't really any downtime involved during the migration from our on-prem to Cisco Cloud Email Security, which was important to us. We didn't want to interrupt email flow. So, we prepared it, then there was a cutover. 

The migration from the vendor’s on-prem to Cloud Email Security wasn't too difficult.

A few times, we needed Cisco's expertise in the migration process to solve some problems for free. Because it is in the cloud, you can't get to the command line interface to access and download/upload files. So, I had to rely on Cisco for that.

There is a huge return compared to if we didn't have a gateway appliance, as far as blocking malicious emails.

The licensing was all transferred. A fair amount of the configuration had to be done by hand. We didn't transfer the people safe list and block lists. There were a number of things that we didn't transfer because they were in the cloud. It was a matter of going through and reconfiguring.

The familiar user interface was important in our decision to migrate from Cisco’s on-prem to Cloud Email Security. We have a lot of other projects going on. Being able to migrate to something that we were already familiar with versus migrating to Proofpoint or something else was a major decision factor. I didn't have to invest that much time, resources, and learning in a whole new product.

If you compare it over Proofpoint, it was a big savings. It was very competitive. It saved us from buying new appliances. Though, I don't know that would have been a big expense, because I didn't do a cost analysis of staying on-prem and replacing the appliances. We were more comparing the solution to Proofpoint, and the cost was considerably less than Proofpoint. It was already in place and working for us on-prem. So, I didn't want to move to Proofpoint because there would have been much more to learn.

Some of the things that we were doing in Cisco, we can't do it the same way in Proofpoint, from as much as I have looked at it. I know there is a difference. They have different solutions. They have some solutions that aren't configurable at all, such as, the lower price ones. They have another one where you are just like a tenant and everybody gets the same thing, then for it to be customizable, it is a lot more expensive. In orders of magnitude, it is more expensive than Cisco, which didn't make sense. With all the little tweaks and customizations that we're doing, I couldn't see how to do that based on the time I spent looking at Proofpoint. It might be doable, but I didn't figure out how to do it. So, I think Cisco is a little more configurable than Proofpoint for tweaking. I could be wrong, but that is my impression.

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).

It is easy to use. It is not widely used, but it is not tough to understand. Usually, it takes five to six months to become an expert in that particular product because there is not much in it.

The Cisco database is more bug-prone and less accurate than the databases of other email security solutions. Whenever we get a phishing email, Microsoft email server, TruePoint, or Barracuda, they have a much better database. Because Cisco is using Talos, which is not a good database, they do not have much information in the database. So that is really lagging very much behind.

So that is not much recommended by the customers. Every time, customers get frustrated by using them.

There's room for improvement in the DevOps database. It has many spam emails. Usually, we have to report to the Telos team for samples, whether it's spam or a legitimate email. If that is done, then the customer environment won't get compromised easily because more than 80% of cyber-attacks are through emails. So email is like sanitizer it was used in hospitals before COVID, but after, it's provided widely to users.

I used this solution for a year. 

I would rate the stability a six out of ten. We had multiple issues with the stability. Usually, the customer complains that there's an email coming from an outside sender, and it enters our environment, and our email gets multiple emails from a single sender. There might be suspicious emails or multiple things that we usually get from customers.

I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten. Cisco has to improve its database because email security is something like DNS servers. So we have to improve the database and put more information initially in it. 

The initial setup is easy. It starts with the VLS for Open IT. Initially, the host access table is there in the front end. Based on that, we can filter out traffic with IPs from the scale of -10 to +10 if it applies. If you want to whitelist an IP, you need to check the IVRX code. If that code is okay, then we provide a list based on the organization. 

It's a bit easy to handle Cisco Secure Email; it's not that difficult. For the logs, which are in PDF format, it's not hard to read them. We don't need Wireshark much to analyze the logs.

Usually, it's GUI-friendly, and also, the Relics are there on the GUI. We can create some relics, or it's automated from the backend by the development team. We just put in our initial setup requirements, and based on that, we create a red x rule. Then we can implement it into the message filter, and we can handle whatever we want, whether it's blocking emails coming from spam or anything else.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. Once you have hands-on experience with it over a period of time, you will get hands-on experience, and you will be able to understand it. It's easy to use, not that much complicated.

It is just another level of protection that we use, as far as email is concerned. We use it for different policies or as another scanning engine, e.g., on the desktop or for data coming through another email gateway.

At one point, there was a zero-day attack. The Cisco appliance detected it and stopped it, helping us out. We avoided the attack and potential damage.

The most valuable feature is the policies or rules that you can put on it. This definitely helps with routing specific things to different destinations within our organization, or even potentially blocking when something is coming in and out, to where you can't do this on an email server or on our other email gateway. It's just not possible.

On their roapmap, they are looking to integrate with different cloud features, like Office 365.

I would like them to add some clustering or high availability features.

More than five years.

It is very stable. I haven't had any issues with memory or CPU. I haven't had any unstable performances from any of the appliances. Initially, we had physical appliances, then we went and upgraded to virtual appliances at some point. However, even the physical appliances were pretty stable.

I did run into one issue at one time where I had to shut something off. It was a bug, but being down for an hour or two is just two costly for our firm.

Deployment and maintenance is handled by two people (email engineers).

Scalability is good. We have four appliances total clustered, two in one data center and two in the other. The ability to increase is definitely doable, and it's helpful if you need to do that.

We are a legal firm with close to 2000 employees.

Technical support is definitely good. The turnaround time to speak to someone is very good, as well.

We had another appliance (Axway MailGate) and switched because it was outdated. Also, their support model wasn't that great. They were difficult to get a hold of after six or seven in the evening.

The initial product setup was easy. However, it was a bit more complex on our side because of some of the rules that we had set up on a previous appliance, which was not Cisco. Trying to match some of those to Cisco was a little complex. We had some consultants help us out with that. Overall, it wasn't too bad.

The deployment took three to five days.

We worked with a partner consulting firm, Presidio, who very useful and helpful.

We did a proof of concept first off, then did a hard cut over on the weekend.

For what you get for the product, the support, and the overall stability, it is definitely a good return on investment.

We do annual licensing for Cisco Secure Email Gateway and SMA together, and possibly SmartNet support. Packaged together, the cost is just under $38,000.

We looked at two or three different vendors. One of the solutions that we looked at was a virtual Linux-based appliance. We did evaluate that and a proof of concept around it. However, it wasn't as robust as Cisco, as far as features and high availability.

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.

Cisco Secure Email is a budget-friendly solution.

I am not satisfied with the solution's reporting and logging.

I have been using Cisco Secure Email for the last five years.

I like Proofpoint's reporting, management, and interface. It has a single dashboard, very simple configuration and integration, and a very user-friendly GUI.

The solution's initial setup is not difficult. However, it has the management's separate interface and email security's separate interface, which we need to manage.

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 use the solution for email security. 

The tool comes with AI features. It is good for clients who already use Cisco products due to integration. 

Cisco Email Secure's pricing needs to be less. We have vendors who provide cheaper solutions with the same features. 

I have been using the product for half a year. 

I rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten. 

I rate Cisco Secure Email a nine out of ten. 

The tool's technical support team answers queries quickly. 

Positive

Comparing Microsoft Defender and Cisco's Email Secure service, partners have noted that while Microsoft Defender offers email security, the tool's additional layer of protection provides further defense against threats like spam and phishing emails. The AI features filter out phishing emails. I have worked with FortiMail and Barracuda before Cisco Secure Email. 

The product's deployment is easy in a cloud environment. You don't need to install it for the Office 365 product. 

Cisco Secure Email is more expensive than other products. I rate it a five out of ten. There are no additional costs. You only need to pay the subscription amounts. 

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