What is our primary use case?
I've used IRONSCALES in multiple scenarios. I first used the solution in the Asia-Pacific region to review suspicious phishing emails in the mailbox instead of reviewing them manually. The primary goal was to have an automated solution for suspicious or weird emails. It automatically reviews them and maybe provides some kind of response. That was our first goal with the product. It reviews the emails, attachments, and links at the same time.
There is an automated piece where people can send an email or forward the email to a review team. It adds an additional mailbox layer on top of our spam quarantine. IRONSCALES captures everything our existing spam quarantine couldn't capture. It also helps us with additional phishing campaigns.
How has it helped my organization?
IRONSCALES has what they call a "911 mailbox" that lets your organization share information about threats. It sets up an address like phish@whateverorganization.com where everyone in the company can forward suspicious emails. IRONSCALES has access to that account to review the emails. All of the phishing emails or anything suspicious goes in that queue.
IRONSCALES will automatically categorize mail if something looks legitimate based on what the admins have already reviewed. It saves us a lot of time. We previously had a regular mailbox to accept suspicious mail from members of organizations. It was tough because everything was all manual, and we had to review a ton of emails some days. Now, people just send everything to the 911 mailbox or click on the "report phishing" button.
If employees have any other questions, they can message or call me. IRONSCALES saved me tremendously because I don't have to worry about manually reviewing that mailbox anymore. Sometimes, the email doesn't reach the queue, and I wonder what's going on. It's probably due to multiple forwards. The phishing campaign assimilation also helps.
What is most valuable?
We like IRONSCALES because it's easy to use and saves us some time. The reporting is good because it has all these tracking features and metrics. It's still evolving, but it's great to have information about automated detection and response, phishing campaigns, simulations, etc.
I would say the most valuable feature is what they call Themis. It's like a virtual analyst that uses the decisions that system admins make to generate a score for whether an email is legitimate, spam, or phishing. It gets better based on the decisions that we make over time. The automation piece is great as well. The integrated approach of email security combined with employee awareness training is excellent.
The AI and machine learning capabilities have come a long way since I first started using the solution. At the same time, any technology is only as good as the team's ability to use it. It's still evolving, and I think machine learning will become increasingly helpful because the more it does, the more accurate it'll be. In the beginning, there will be a lot of false positives, but it will become better as you provide more feedback and I think a lot of security teams are trying to do more of that too.
Integration is also crucial because there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. Right now, I need to go to 10 different portals to check something, like a security incident. Integration with everything is always useful.
IRONSCALES has made improvements to its automated detection and response. If your company gets a targeted phishing email, there are two options. You have the option to leave comments and feedback in a form, and that's only limited to the people in the company. There's also a secondary form that's can be externally shared with existing customers or anyone with access to the IRONSCALES API.
Automated detection and response are good, but it depends on the specific email that comes in. I can only speak for my company. which is in the field of life sciences and healthcare, but we get all the typical phishing emails.
Microsoft has many domains, like outlook.com, live.com, microsoft.com, and 365 office support. A lot of phishing campaigns use these domains. They know nobody can block these domains as most people use Microsoft, UEX, or Mac shop. Phishers disguise themselves using a compromised legitimate business email account and start sending emails that say: "Please log in here." It looks like it's going to the organization's Office 365 website, but it's going to the other compromised organization. People are more likely to trust that.
IRONSCALES also has a mobile app on Android and iOS. We mostly used it when we had a bigger team. I've been using it since the earliest version when they only had a web interface but not the official Apple or Android or mobile version. It's great for following up when you may not have access to a desktop computer or laptop.
It's great for getting a sense of what specific phishing or incidents or events are coming into the IRONSCALES dashboard portal. When you need to do more digging, you probably don't want to look at the application on the phone because it's too small, and you have to dive in to see the email headers. I use it for limited purposes, like quickly checking an email to see if it looks legitimate, so I can re-categorize it. I need to go into the computer if it's anything more.
What needs improvement?
In addition to integrated training, they should also have personalized training that you don't have to do as part of a phishing campaign or a simulation. It could be launched separately as a learning management system, a squirm file, or something like that. IRONSCALES is working on that, so hopefully, we'll have that soon.
In the last four or five months, we started a new security operation center. We had to train and onboard the employees. We tried to get IRONSCALES audit logs into our SIM, rather than it going from cloud to cloud, but it does not work right now. I would like to see this as a new feature.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using IRONSCALES for more than five years. I was one of the first 100 IRONSCALES customers, and they've added a lot of the features that I requested.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
IRONSCALES is highly stable. It's a growing ecosystem for this company. IRONSCALES plans to introduce integrations with learning management systems and various malware companies, like CrowdStrike and Carbon Black. Now, they also use their own algorithm to determine malicious payloads. That will be a useful feature.
How are customer service and support?
I rate IRONSCALES support nine out of ten. I think they've improved greatly. I've been with them since the beginning and worked with all the founding members of the company. There's one person I still work with who is pretty high up in the company now. She created most of the documentation. I work with many of the same salespeople and support.
Many years ago, they had no U.S. office, so we had to contact them in Israel, and there was a significant time difference. They opened an office in Atlanta, and they've developed an official knowledge base. They also have a customer portal and designated customer success managers.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I used a few solutions and did some PoCs back in the day. Most of the solutions I've used were basic spam filters. I was the one who introduced IRONSCALES to our company. We used Mimecast for spam quarantine and our primary and secondary MX records. It does its job.
We used Mimecast for spam filtering and email archives. It's tough if you need to troubleshoot across different infrastructures or technology. That's the advantage of IRONSCALES. In the past, I had to go through every system and check the Microsoft Outlook program to see if it was 32-bit or 64-bit and install it one by one. It's straightforward just like any other company that uses Office 365 extensions. You only need a standard account that can install additional applications on Office 365, and you can define users. After that, you can do that to all global users.
How was the initial setup?
I was involved in the deployment from the beginning, from the architecture design and gathering requirements to the final setup. When I first deployed it, I was working in China, so anything that relies on Google wasn't going to work. It works in Hong Kong, but it doesn't work in mainland China because of the Great Firewall. This was eight years ago when IRONSCALES was extremely new. When I originally deployed it, we wanted to get this to every user.
At the time, we didn't have the option to deploy this through Microsoft Office 365. We had to go to every machine or a software installer to deploy it. That took a little more time. It didn't prevent the project plan, but it was an issue because installing the wrong extensions in Outlook can crash the program. This was back in the day, but now it's easy.
When we didn't have the Microsoft Office 365 plugin capability or an API mailbox layer, it probably took us about a week to test it because we had to install it on all the computers. With the Office 365 capabilities, we could probably do it in a day or two because it's all tied to Office 365, and we can define it according to the group.
IRONSCALES doesn't require us to touch the client assets anymore. We had to install it one by one in the past, but now we only need to have administrative rights on Office 365 and we can just deploy it as a new application. We can select a few users or deploy it to all users.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
A few years ago, I looked at two other alternatives, but the market has probably changed since then. I checked out other Mimecast solutions because we had Mimecast deployed. They didn't have some features that IRONSCALES has. They might have similar features now, but I don't trust them until I actually try them myself. Mimecast has many of the features that IRONSCALES offers, like automated detection and response as well as the phishing campaign, but I don't know if it works as well as IRONSCALES.
Even though Mimecast is based closer to home in Lexington, Massachusetts, it was tough to get tasks done in terms of feature requests. When I first evaluated it about four years ago, Mimecast didn't have as much functionality. Mimecast works by scrambling every link. That's how they do their threat response. It's encrypted, so you need to decrypt or read anything Mimecast sends. I was the one who worked with IRONSCALES and Mimecast to unencrypt everything.
The email comes into Mimecast and goes to IRONSCALES because IRONSCALES is on the API. We started to get emails from Mimecast that were encrypted and couldn't read the link. We could do it when working with both IRONSCALES and Mimecast and now they do that for all the customers.
What other advice do I have?
I rate IRONSCALES nine and a half out of ten. Before deploying any solution, we always research user feedback, check Gartner, etc. Ultimately, it all depends on how much you can afford, but Gartner's gives you a good list to choose from.
You can also ask IRONSCALES directly for some customer references. Of course, you don't want to only talk to customers who have positive feedback on IRONSCALES. Ask other users in your own network: "Hey, why did you stop using IRONSCALES?" That's what I like to do, but I often ask the vendor to arrange that.
I worked with IRONSCALES for about eight years and they've grown in size. There were only around 25 to 50 people at the company when I started working with them. After more than doubling in size, they're still highly responsive to feature requests. I also occasionally speak with their product development teams. If you ask for a feature based on your needs or environment, they'll usually add it fairly quickly— sometimes within three to six months depending on the feature request.