We compared Cisco Secure Email and Perception Point Advanced Email Security across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: Cisco Secure Email offers advanced protection against phishing attacks, reputation-based filtering, and robust tracking functionalities. Perception Point Advanced Email Security is known for its ability to identify impersonation attacks and exceptional scanning capabilities.
Room for Improvement: Cisco Secure Email should improve global malicious email defense, data loss prevention, and integration with third-party solutions. Perception Point Advanced Email Security could improve content analysis and the ability to detect BEC attacks.
Service and Support: Cisco support is generally considered knowledgeable and helpful, but a few users reported slow response times and difficulty navigating the support process. Perception Point's customer service is highly regarded for being responsive, attentive, and interactive.
Ease of Deployment: Cisco Secure Email is generally straightforward and seamless to set up. It provides a modular and adaptable environment, but new users may need training. Some users find Perception Point’s setup process to be straightforward and easy, while others have encountered hurdles.
Pricing: Opinions on the pricing of Cisco Secure Email are mixed. Some find it expensive but worth the investment, while others find it reasonably priced and competitive with other vendors. Perception Point Advanced Email Security offers affordable pricing that accommodates all budgets and delivers satisfactory value.
ROI: Cisco Secure Email's return on investment is influenced by factors such as use case, organization size, and industry. Perception Point Advanced Email Security excels in its ability to detect threats effectively, resulting in significant time and cost savings by preventing downtime and the need for extensive cleanup.
Comparison Results: Cisco Secure Email is highly regarded for its intelligence threat detection, reputation filtering, and robust tracking abilities. The solution’s areas for improvement include data loss prevention and third-party integration. Perception Point Advanced Email Security is praised for its ability to detect and prevent impersonation attacks and great customer support. The solution could improve in detecting BEC attacks and providing user-friendly configuration options.
"Threat Explorer is one of the features that I very much like because it is a real-time report that allows you to identify, analyze, and trace security attacks."
"At the moment we are satisfied with this product. It's a stable, scalable, and resilient solution for us."
"The good part is that you don't have to configure it, which is very convenient."
"The two main features that prove most beneficial for us are URL scanning and attachment scanning."
"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."
"The product is not resource-intensive."
"Our customers are satisfied with Defender for 365 because Microsoft products are easy to use and customize to meet the client's needs. Everything is in one place, so we can adjust policies as needed for phishing, DLP, ATP, or any other security features that our clients want to apply."
"Safe attachments, safe links, policies, and the ability to protect from zero-day threats are the most valuable features."
"The tech engineers are very knowledgeable."
"Cisco Secure Email's most valuable is email certification."
"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."
"The most valuable features are Advanced Malware Protection, URL filtering, and of course Reputation Filtering."
"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."
"It integrates with Active Directory and we can limit specific users to using specific applications."
"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 product blocks spam emails."
"The Perception Point Incident Response team acts as an extension of our SOC team. This is very important for us. This is a benefit provided for their main product of scanning our emails. If Perception Point can give me IR, this is really good versus other products that do not provide this kind of service. Perception Point's service is great. They are very professional. That reduces the time that my internal SOC has to deal with my internal IT person. They just send an email to the IR team at Perception Point, who continues the investigation and blocks any emails, if necessary. This is very good because it can reduce a lot of time and effort from my team. It is like an extension of my SOC, but external."
"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."
"What's really good about this platform is that you have full visibility, it has a very nice and very friendly UI, it's quick, and there's no latency in the scanning."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"I see from time to time that Perception Point is being proactive. They approach us, and say, "Can you check this, and this?" So, it does seem that they are an extension of my incident response."
"Another feature that we really like, one that was introduced a few months back, is the way it categorizes threats into groups, such as Emotet, Qbot, Formbook, and the like. It's not only telling you that something is malware, but it's also giving you insight into what kind of malware... You understand what you are facing and whether you are a target for a specific group of threats..."
"It has modules to detect malware and that is a strong point. It has a very nice way of showing you, directly in the product, a lot of details about certain pieces of malware. It goes very deep and even shows you the assembly code. It also does detonations on files and shows you the results in different operating systems. That is very useful."
"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."
"Several simulation options are available within 365, and the phishing simulation could be better."
"The pre-sales cost calculations could be more transparent."
"Microsoft sometimes has downtime, and we'll get several incidents coming in back to back. We have a huge backlog of notifications, many of which may be false positives. However, there might be serious alerts, so we can't risk dismissing all of them at once."
"The company should focus on adding threats that the solution is currently unable to detect."
"Microsoft wants its well-paying customers to finish testing some of its half-baked products, find bugs, and report bugs back to Microsoft's team, which is a little frustrating for those who have to manage it and roll it up to thousands of people across the organization."
"The visibility for the weaknesses in the system and unauthorized access can be improved."
"We need to be able to whitelist data at the backend."
"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."
"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."
"In future releases, I would like to see two main improvements come to mind. First, the current solution requires maintaining two separate operating systems for FTD, which can be cumbersome. I'd love to see a single operating system for the FTD box."
"I would like them to add some clustering or high availability features."
"We have Microsoft and we have the E5 licenses, they have more EDR responses on certain emails. That's something that Cisco ESA on the cloud doesn't have. They don't do anything about MITRE attacks. They only detect if there is a malicious email or a threat and they remove it."
"I would rate the stability a six out of ten. We had multiple issues with the stability."
"The area of license renewal should be improved. We normally renew our license every year. There is a feature called smart licensing, and I switched from the legacy mode to the smart licensing mode because of what I thought smart licensing does. I thought it would make licensing renewal seamless and very swift, but ever since I've switched to smart licensing, each time I want to renew my license, it is a whole lot of headache. The process is not smooth, and I had to keep calling Cisco TAC to see how the issue can be resolved. At one point, I wanted to revert back to the legacy mode, but I can't revert. Once you switch from the legacy mode to the smart licensing mode, you can't revert. They should improve on the visibility of the smart licensing mode so that it can indeed be smart and easier to use for the license renewal every year. That is one challenge."
"The user interface is a bit complex."
"The pricing needs to be reconsidered or enhanced."
"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."
"There is still room for improvement with BEC. There is more work to be done by Perception Point on machine learning and neuro language as well. BEC is very difficult if you don't have a computer language looking into the content of the email and trying to make a determination through that. With BEC you often don't have an attachment or a URL."
"Email alerts should be available in real-time."
"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."
"It would be helpful for Perception Point Advanced Email Security to have more integration with other solutions."
"Coming from products in the Microsoft stack, Perception Point doesn't really give you, as an admin, a lot of options to make changes yourself. It's more on their side to make changes in the back end. That's something they could improve on in the future."
"There is room for improvement in terms of adding the DLP (Data Loss Prevention) solution, which would be a good option for Perception Point to look into."
"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."
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Cisco Secure Email is ranked 2nd in Email Security with 56 reviews while Perception Point Advanced Email Security is ranked 16th in Email Security with 21 reviews. Cisco Secure Email is rated 8.4, while Perception Point Advanced Email Security is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Email writes "Has effortless spam control, improves security posture, and frees up our IT department's time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Perception Point Advanced Email Security writes "Incident Response team answers immediately and fine-tunes system to continually improve detection". Cisco Secure Email is most compared with Trellix Collaboration Security, Fortinet FortiMail, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Proofpoint Email Protection and Trend Micro Email Security, whereas Perception Point Advanced Email Security is most compared with Avanan, Proofpoint Email Protection, IRONSCALES, Sophos Email and TitanHQ SpamTitan. See our Cisco Secure Email vs. Perception Point Advanced Email Security report.
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We monitor all Email Security reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.