Symantec Messaging Gateway Reviews

We primarily use the solution for security - to protect us from malware and to have anti-spam, content filtering. It's for that initial inspection of email before it gets into our environment.

The solution is stable and the performance is good. 

Technical support, under Symantec, was good.

They were great at keeping up with patching.

The product could scale.

The initial setup wasn't too difficult. 

Having the control center in just one place was difficult. Now that they are moving to the cloud, it will be less of an issue. 

The solution is slightly outdated. The version that we have now is due to the fact that the company hasn't moved up to the latest version. They're on 10.6 and the latest version is 10.74 or something like that. They were four versions behind.

The biggest problem is it's an on-prem product and we're trying to get out of having equipment in data centers. The company wants the reliability that the cloud offers. That's the main justification for leaving that product. I know they offer a cloud solution, however, when you have Microsoft having it as part of a package and you're already kind of paying for something, it makes sense to move over, rather than have two solutions doing the same thing in one company.

I worked for the company that I'm working at now, for 19 years, however, I was gone for six years. In that 19 years, I had about 10 years where I was using Symantec Messaging Gateway. 

The stability is good. It's not buggy or glitchy. It works well. The performance is good.

I haven't messed with it in six years, and prior to that, there were not really any issues. It was a pretty good product, and they kept up with security patches. I noticed that we have a product that looks for vulnerabilities. If it's alarming, Symantec will come back and say, "No, we're good, we don't have that code in our product." They seem to have been pretty good with that.

It was pretty easy to scale. You just added more scanners. The one downside was you could only have one control center unless you wanted to manually keep two different control centers at two different data centers, and configure them the same. 

That said, you'll never 100% have them alike. That's the one downside is that you're stuck with, no matter how you scale your scanners, in the DMZ, and you still have that one control center inside. That's how we deployed it. If we lose that data center, we lose that control center. There are some white papers out there now on how to make that change to a different control center, so it is possible, however, it's been a long time since I've looked at that.

We have about 15,000 end-users on the solution currently. 

Technical support was fine when it was Symantec. It might have changed since it was bought out by Broadcom. I can't speak to that.

We're moving over to Microsoft Defender P2.

I'm on a project now, however, the hardware's old as we bought it originally back when you bought the appliance from Symantec. Due to the fact that the hardware's old, and since the company's already paying for Microsoft, we've decided to just go full-on with the Defender P2 license, and pull that old hardware, and take the Symantec Messaging Gateway out. The goal is to get everything into the cloud. 

The initial setup isn't too complex. That said, there are some challenges when you start stacking on different policies and stuff like that.

I didn't know the pricing when we bought it, and that was a long time ago. I can't speak to the exact costs. 

We are currently on the oldest version that's supported. It might be around version 10.