What is our primary use case?
We utilize the solution to send all our email to their cloud to filter it.
How has it helped my organization?
The biggest benefit of being a partner of TitanHQ is being able to offer their products across the board, whether the client is a small company with five people, or a growing or midsize company, and it even works for some large companies. WebTitan even comes with an on-prem DNS proxy, so you can also proxy all your information. You can also dictate who has access, who gets filtered, and who doesn't get filtered. For us, it's quite easy to sell it because it's not overly complicated and it doesn't require lots of modules.
With SpamTitan there are large savings for IT because they are not bombarded with phishing emails and thousands of spam emails, bad URLs, and bad domain names. The filtering technology helps safeguard their environment and, by the same token, it actually frees up time for folks to do some work that is native to their environment and not waste time.
It helps employees save time, as well, because they're getting the emails that they expect. It could be saving them 90 minutes a day, on average, and maybe more, if people have some training. If we're talking about IT folks who earn in the range of $90,000 to well over $100,000, 90 minutes times 10 guys could be over $1,000 a day in savings. It adds up fast.
If you're dealing with email threats, users will not use their email if they think they have been attacked, so they won't be working. The IT guys that handle tickets are then tied up and have to manage the tickets. A ticket goes up the chain to the correct group and they have to analyze it and decide whether it's something they can do or if it goes further up. If they can't handle it, it's going to go up to cyber security. We're talking about four or five people that have touched it, each spending 10 or 15 minutes. Multiply that by X dollars and it adds up. They have to get in touch with the user, check the unit, and they might have to take that person offline. And maybe the person who makes a lot of money a year is tied up for an hour. Before you know it, you're $1,500 in the hole, just for one phishing email, because you don't want it spreading, and you don't want the person on the network. It's a snowball effect. One wrong click and you could be in trouble really fast.
What is most valuable?
The system analyzes and catalogs what's good and what's bad. The cool thing about SpamTitan is that it saves a report on what it did not allow to hit your inbox. You can then easily block those domains, which is helpful because people will use different names before the "@" symbol in an email address. By blocking the whole domain, no matter what they do, they can't send you any email via that domain.
It's pretty straightforward and pretty easy to use. It's mostly automated and that makes it easy for an IT department to keep tabs on it.
The key differentiators of the product for an MSP are its ease of use and effectiveness. It generates reports and makes things easy for IT to manage. It's a set-it-and-forget-it type of solution. It gives you one pane of glass. There are two different cloud URLs but you just create a shortcut on your desktop and IT people can jump in and out of it in seconds.
We also use the geo-blocking feature a lot for clients that don't have interests outside the US. If they receive stuff from overseas where they don't have a relationship, we can turn off that flow. In the future, if they start working with, say, a Chinese company, it can be turned back on. It makes it convenient for dictating how an organization deals with the outside world on an everyday basis. As soon as we turn it on, we notice a massive increase in protection, in terms of the number of emails being caught.
We can watch the results almost in real time. It has a pretty consistent synchronization with email clients, whether it's O365 or a web-type email. You can still dictate what comes in. If you don't like Gmail accounts or random Yahoo account emails, you can filter them out. Bad people use any trick they can get their hands on, including fake company names that have one extra letter. Or they will say an email is from the president, or it is an alert. They use scare tactics to get you to open and click on things.
The geo-blocking ability is really important because a lot of outside threats are coming from other governments. There's a lot going on, like espionage, hacking, and the stealing of data and trade secrets. Companies are ruthless, so it's a free-for-all on the web if you don't have a solid front door for protection and your walls are made out of "paper." You need steel walls now and multiple layers just to keep things at bay.
SpamTitan's internal technology definitely does a great job analyzing where something is coming from and analyzing the technical side of the data. If something was redirected, it can detect the origin and track down where the server it came from is. Even if the IP range changes, it can let you know where the origin was. It's pretty good at doing its job.
In terms of geo-blocking exceptions, I have bought products from the UK, and their updates and download packages all come from outside the US. I can instruct it so that the UK, specifically, is open. I can also allow just that particular UK domain and if I see unwanted UK addresses, I can add them to the blocked domain-name section. That way, I can have something open and still block others at the same time.
What needs improvement?
With the geo-blocking tool, it would be nice if it listed checkboxes for all the countries and had one overall checkbox for the whole area. Right now, you have to start typing them all in, or half type them, to get the list. That's time-consuming and is one thing I don't like.
Also, it would be nice to know when the DNS proxy version needs to be updated. They should send out the customer's version number, and why it needs to be upgraded, a month or two before it's necessary. That would be helpful so we don't find ourselves wondering why the DNS proxy we have right now just randomly stopped updating, when it's because a new version came out.
Their room for improvement is minuscule. It's more end-user or IT types of fixes, rather than functionality. The functionality is great. It's just that the ease of use could be improved for someone who didn't know you have to type things in. It should be easier for a junior IT guy to get in there without having to say, "How do I do this?"
For how long have I used the solution?
We've been using SpamTitan for about four years. We are an MSP and SSP, which means we're on the security side, and we are a TitanHQ partner.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is awesome. They have a very high 99.9 percent uptime.
A lot of companies that offer cloud services definitely go out of their way to have that high percentage of uptime. If your email goes down, you're not able to talk to anybody. It has to have a high rate of uptime. It's comparable to other solutions.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
This is the most accurate threat detection and content filtering tool on the market today. It has flexible deployment options, including roaming clients for all operating systems, and Active Directory integration. It has features to fit your organization, whether you're fully remote, hybrid, or back in the office.
How are customer service and support?
Their tech support is great. If I have a question or it stops working, they're really quick. I can open a ticket and work with a technician and they're pretty good at helping resolve issues. They're very effective. And they go out of their way to meet with folks and give you the support that you're looking for.
Compared to some of their competitors, they're quick. You don't have to wait three or four days for someone to pick up a ticket. Other solutions can be a little slower, in my experience. The level of expertise from TitanHQ's support is right up there. The engineers or the people that deal with the product every day know the product like the back side of their hand.
With every problem I've had, they've knocked it out of the park.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were using DNS filtering, but we soon realized we needed more security.
How was the initial setup?
WebTitan Cloud is a cloud-based web filtering solution that allows you to monitor, control, and protect your users and business when online. It requires no on-premise software or end-user client software, and the setup of the cloud filter is extraordinarily simple and quick.
What about the implementation team?
They have very detailed support page with easy-to-follow guides and if you get stuck you can request support. We did ours in-house and was pretty straight forward to roll out. The support team is Top Notch!!!
What was our ROI?
The ROI is low because it is a hosted solution and the technology is on the backend. This saves us a ton of time each month.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Block Malware, Ransomware, and Phishing Advanced DNS Web Security and Content Filtering Software. WebTitan helps control the web content your staff accesses and protects your business from online threats with powerful DNS filtering. The setup and low cost are a huge plus!
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We picked SpamTitan over other solutions. I like its usability, affordability, and ease of maintenance. It's constantly being tweaked behind the scenes. There are small things that happen under the covers that we don't see, but they're definitely wise to what's going on out there. There aren't many cons to the solution.
Just because they're not extremely expensive doesn't mean they don't work. You don't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on something, just to get it to work. TitanHQ does a great job with the product. They do a lot of advanced DNS scoping and a lot of preventive work against phishing and malware. They definitely protect their users quite effectively. And they have a 14-day trial so you can try it out.
What other advice do I have?
As an MSP, there are aspects of the product's technology that helps us acquire new customers and add value. First, it's pretty straightforward and easy to roll out and add to someone's layers of security, which makes it an easy and affordable solution. Also, it's not extremely expensive. Other solutions get really pricey, really fast. In addition, WebTitan and SpamTitan work hand in hand. I recommend getting both. It also has a dashboard for both so you can see what's coming in and what's getting blocked, what the URL was, and it even divides it up by categories with overall percentages. That way, if you want to tweak the way people surf the net, you can certainly do that.
The bad guys (Bad Actors) have lots of money and lots of bad helpers. They probably have more resources than you do. They're trying to get in and you're trying to block them. It's cops and robbers. But with the right tools, you can make your good guys' house really strong and defeat most of the bad guys. Obviously, they don't want to get caught, so the more they hang around or try to get into something, the more likely it is that something is going to track them. If there's enough tracking, you can find out their IP, because everybody has one assigned and it goes all the way down to their username and address. Unfortunately, there are super-smart ones and you'll never see them coming. There's just nothing you can do about that unless you have a locked-down local environment with no outside access, and some places do that.
Small and medium companies, with the growth of hacking and malware, can be prime targets for attacks. There are studies that show that half of SMBs have suffered cyber-attacks. They need security that works for them to keep them safe from constant attacks. I would highly recommend SpamTitan, and I have been in the industry for 35 years. It's very effective and very easy to use.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
*Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: MSP, MSSP
