Barracuda Email Security Gateway Reviews

I'm still new to the Barracuda. We're using the Email Security Gateway, however, I'm not sure about the cloud, or the archive capabilities. It's a new system for me. 

Email security has been quite helpful. It acts as a protector, especially for the inbound emails every day. I can see if there are a lot of phishing emails or scam emails being blocked by the system. That's very important for the company. The organization is so big, and with so many emails coming in, having it as the first line of defense is great.

The interface is good, and it offers good integrations. 

The solution offers very good email security. It protects us from spam and scam emails. 

It offers good visibility of any potential threats trying to enter the system.

The initial setup should be straightforward.

It is cloud-based.

So far, the solution has been stable. 

We find the product to be scalable. 

The pricing is a little bit high, and it is causing the company to rethink renewal. If they could lower the pricing, that would be ideal. 

I'm still pretty new to the solution. I haven't used it for that long. 

I haven't heard of the term having issues with reliability. It is stable. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is scalable. It's easy to expand. 

We have about 2,000 people using the solution. 

I haven't had a chance to work with technical support. I don't know how helpful or responsive they are. 

I have experience with Mimecast. I used it about two or three years ago. Barracuda is a bit different from Mimecast. I recall Mimecast having good integration with Microsoft 365 Exchange Online. We used it to protect email and block malware mostly. 

I'm new to the company. I wasn't involved in the initial setup of the product. That said, my understanding is that it is straightforward. 

I don't deal with the licensing and can't speak to the exact cost of the solution. 

We are customers and end-users, not partners. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for email security.

The solution is largely stable. 

It can scale. 

Overall, it has been working fine without issue. 

The message tracking and messaging logs have proven to be quite useful. 

The initial setup can be a little bit complex.

When we implemented Barracuda three years back, although the deployment went smoothly, we also needed to implement some changes regarding the configuration, which were affecting the stamp control rate. Some options were not so easy to remember and we had to search for directions.

For example, if I want to change the mail flow settings, there are two different options available in Barracuda. If I apply a change on one option and didn't change the configuration on the other option, the mail flow doesn't work. Yet the second option is always hidden. I always need to search for it when I need to change some mail flow settings.

I've used the solution for more than three years. 

The product is stable. Sometimes some spamming issues occur, however, we manage to control those after making some changes.

We have a model that supports 5,000 users. We currently have 3,500 users. We have room to scale. 

The solution does work fine with a large number of users. 

I administer the solution and provide troubleshooting and issue resolution as required. The support from Barracuda is pretty good overall when I reach out. 

Neutral

I have an experience with Barracuda Email Security, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft Defender.

The initial setup and implementation process is complex. It is not exactly easy.

I'd rate it 2.5 out of five in terms of ease of setup.

The pricing is moderate. It was neither cheap nor expensive. 

I'd rate the cost 3.5 out of five in terms of affordability.

We're a Barracuda customer.

We are using virtual appliances, not the cloud version of the solution. That said, we do plan to move to the cloud. 

While we are not planning to change Barracuda, we are planning to improve Barracuda after purchasing the cloud solution. Our plan is to enhance our email security when we integrate our appliance with the Barracuda Cloud solution.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. Some of the exposed emails were not blocked by our Barracuda clients. Although we have engaged the principal, and they helped troubleshoot and tweak some configurations, it's still an issue. We still face some exposed emails delivered to our management level.

I'd advise potential new users that if they plan to implement Barracuda, they should find someone knowledgeable in implementations. They need someone who will follow best practices and understand procedures laid out in the documentation. After configuration and implementation, there may still be some fine-tuning required. 

Barracuda is similar to FortiMail. There is a cloud component that acts like a sandbox. The email enters, and you can open a suspicious attachment to see if it's malicious. If you find that it's malicious, you can block it and send it to Barracuda's on-prem device.

The on-prem device looks for other details like URLs and particular types of content. If everything looks okay, it's forwarded to the SMTP server and the user. We have around 20 to 30 users.

I like Barracuda's cloud sandbox feature. 

Barracuda's spam database isn't on par with its competitors. Users complain about the spam email they're receiving, and we report the issue. Barracuda said they are going to update their system to block the malicious email we received, but we're still getting the same spam. The signatures are not in their database. They need to update their spam signatures because spam is bypassing Barracuda.

I have been working with Barracuda for almost three years.

Barracuda is quite stable.

Barracuda scales as well as FortiMail. You can scale up based on the number of users per box and the email receiver.

Barracuda provides solid support, but they have a different model. They open the terminal, check the issue, and then tell us the problem. 

Barracuda is just like Kaspersky or FortiMail. The initial setup is seamless. They provide the box, and we must mount and configure it according to the customer's environment. It takes about a day or a half-day if you're familiar with the Barracuda environment.

I can easily configure it because it's so typical. When I configure any box, I go over the features. For example, I will first configure the SMTP server if I want to create an inbound flow. I look for that feature and configure it. The fundamentals don't vary much between devices. Some options might be different, or the features may have another name. There may be some additional features that FortiMail has, but Barracuda doe not. It varies from device to device, but the basic configuration is the same.

I rate Barracuda Email Security Gateway six out of 10. Based on my experience, we are recommending FortiMail or Barracuda because we find these two solutions the most stable. FortiMail has fewer issues with spam.

The solution helps manage both inbound and outbound email. It prevents email phishing, spam attacks, and major attacks, securing email communication against various threats, including social engineering and compromised addresses. It has multiple features to prevent the user from being the victim of attacks.

Barracuda does not provide support for DMARC for outgoing emails. DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance.

For troubleshooting it at the core, We have to open a separate support to provide accessibility to the IT team, facilitating engineers to get into it and offer support. We have to establish a separate support tunnel at the customer site to make it accessible to the cloud, allowing the tagged engineers, potentially situated in another country, to provide remote support to the customers.

I have been using Barracuda Email Security Gateway for two and a half years.

The product is stable.

After three or four years, you can switch the hardware. When a new technology becomes available or the existing hardware needs an upgrade, they replace the customer's hardware box with a new one without additional charges. Barracuda does not charge extra for deploying the new boxes or for replacement. The best feature is their box is refreshed after some time according to their hardware renewal policies.

The solution is very scalable.

We deployed the solution on different company and customer sites.

We’ve around nine to ten customers using the solution.

FortiMail Security Gateway is far better than Barracuda Email Security Gateway.

Barracuda’s reporting feature allows you to locate particular logs and issues. The solution analyzes the issue if an email is not received at the recipient site. It also monitors email in the queue. FortiMail is difficult to handle from a reporting perspective. You have to dig deep into the logs to understand why a specific email is not being sent or received.

The initial setup and configuration are straightforward. It requires no MF records to be enabled. The platform provides two distinct interfaces for easy domain and IP address management with blacklisting and whitelisting capabilities.

To configure the system, you must set up SMTP servers, mail servers, and email addresses, enabling various security features such as anti-phishing, antivirus, content deployment, email reconstruction, etc. It is very simple to configure and use.

The solution is cheaper than FortiMail.

I have deployed one box on-site but also provided support for deployed boxes in many customer sites, Government sites, and private sectors.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Our customers use this solution for screening.

Customer support is the solution's strongest point.

Some customers experience issues with integration.

Our organization has integrated this solution for the last six years.

I rate the stability an eight out of ten.

We have 12 customers using the solution.

I used the support ticket and the response was perfect.

Positive

Our engineer manages the implementation and maintenance.

The solution's pricing is exceedingly high, and it continues to increase. Many-a-time, customers do not renew the solution due to the high price. I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten.

Overall, I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Barracuda protects you from spam and email-based threats like phishing. It also provides backup and web security. We have around 600 users.

My current company had no product before Barracuda. We get a lot of added value from the various things it does, ranging from advanced threat protection and spam filtering to protection from viruses and email spoofing. It also features cloud-to-cloud backup.

The feature that sets Barracuda apart from other solutions is the Office 365 cloud-to-cloud backup.

The UI could be a little cleaner and require less clicking around in different modules. They give the illusion of a single pane of glass, but as you click around to different products, you're actually being transferred into a different system.

I've never seen Barracuda go down. It seems like a highly stable product.

Barracuda is fully scalable. It's an enterprise solution that can handle a few hundred boxes to millions.

Over the past decade and a half, I have used various products. I worked with Mimecast, targeted threat protection for seven of the last 12 years, and used ATP for four of the previous seven.

In the last 12 months, I went to Barracuda because they have an online backup system for our Office 365 tenant as an add-on. It's a package that you get with spam protection, and it's cost-effective. Barracuda offers a suite of services similar to what Mimecast includes and backup retention, which is crucial for the Office 365 environment.

Setting up Barracuda is straightforward. I usually pay a nominal fee for their deployment services, and they help us get off the ground. You can deploy in under two hours. I got deployment included for free, but I think it's normally something like $2,500 or something. My entire team is three people, so it doesn't take a lot of effort to maintain.

We're paying around $49,000 for a year for 600 users.

I rate Barracuda Email Security Gateway as a solid nine out of 10. Their spam protection is excellent, but the UI could be better. Their ATP and threat protections are great. I would give them a 10, but the UI requires just enough extra clicks to annoy me.

When you're setting up Barracuda, make sure you're asking all the right questions about setting up your DMARC and DKIM. You need to plan to take advantage of the whole product instead of a small portion of it.

The solution is the first security layer for emails that come into our network, and we use it to filter all spam, phishing emails, and malware that come in via email.

We are now using the virtual appliance in our VMware environment.

In the past, we had a lot of problems from threats and malware that came into our network, directly from email. Users would receive the content and click on a malicious link or open a malicious attachment, and that caused us a lot of problems.

By choosing Barracuda as our solution for filtering, year by year we have seen a big improvement in our environment with a significant reduction in the number of threats. Consequently, we have fewer problems with users. In the past, users who clicked on this malicious content had to stop work for a long period while our support team helped them. We have almost 600 employees, and every month we had a lot of problems with that. Today we have good security maturity using this solution. It has reduced the risk in our environment. Employees lose less time due to malicious content on their computers. Barracuda has helped to secure the gateway.

The spam filtering, in particular, is very important for us. We have a large volume of emails each month, something like 200,000, and Barracuda filters about 85 percent of the spam, malware, and phishing that comes in. It prevents our users from receiving this content on their computers.

We have been using Barracuda Email Security Gateway for 15 years.

In our environment today, the stability is good.

The problems we have at times are not about the performance or availability, but about the quality of the detection for some threats. The model that we have does not have a sandbox resource, which other versions Barracuda offer. Sometimes we receive a phishing email that has a malicious link, for example. Even though it is an old threat, Barracuda can't detect it. Sometimes these messages are delivered to our users. This is a gap that we have identified.

Because we use the on-premises version, we don't have many options when it comes to scalability. But in our headquarters, we have the same solution working at the same time in two different data centers for availability.

We have plans to update to the next version, preferably the cloud version, where we can have more options for using the other resources and layers that Barracuda offers. We don't have access to those today on the version we have.

Everyone that I have contacted in their technical support is a professional. They always respond quickly and are very patient, for all the problems we have raised. The technical support really is very good. And today, that makes a real difference. Barracuda is a North American company, but they have support 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We are in a different time zone, but we always get support quickly.

Positive

In addition to Barracuda, we used an open-source solution from Linux.

It's not so hard to deploy. Barracuda has a huge forum on the internet with a lot of simple guides to follow. In our case, it was very simple to deploy the solution. Obviously, you need to have some knowledge about your network and the protocols, but every time that we need to use support they are always available very quickly to help us. But overall, the deployment is very simple.

The first time we deployed it, it took about three hours.

Ahead of deployment, we had some meetings with our IT team at our headquarters in Germany because we needed to create some rules in our network in Germany as well as here in Brazil. We chose the best resources for virtualization in our environment. We needed to design exactly how it would work: how Barracuda would receive emails and how we would address emails from our Microsoft Exchange before they went to Barracuda. We always used the Barracuda guidelines in the deployment process.

For our 600 users we have two people involved in the solution, a security guy and a network guy.

If we didn't have a solution like Barracuda in our environment, we would probably have a lot of problems that would directly impact our business. There would be employees who wouldn't be able to work because their machines were infected by threats after they opened email. If we calculate how many users used to be impacted in a year, and how much each one cost the company when not able to work, it would not be a good result. 

With this solution, we can prevent users and their work from being impacted and, consequently, reduce the impact to our business.

Barracuda has the best price. Every year we need to renew our license, and every year I need to compare Barracuda to two or three other players in the market. Barracuda always has a price that is 30 to 40 percent less than the other players' prices.

Last year we paid for the possibility of changing our hardware every three years. But now, because we changed the licensing model to a virtualization model, we don't need that. We just pay for the product and the support. There are two separate costs.

Over the last two years, I have looked at other solutions that might give us more ability to handle new threats. For example, I have looked at solutions that have a sandbox feature integrated into them. But, Barracuda has given us a good idea of what it proposes to do. They already have the solution that I am looking for, but because of costs, we haven't been able to deploy it.

The advantage of Barracuda is its availability. Barracuda provides really good performance and is able to handle tons of emails by the minute and by the hour. The con is that we still have critical threats coming into our environment and delivered to our users. When we compare it with other solutions, these other solutions can already detect those threats.

Barracuda's technology is the kind of technology that gives us a good balance among security, value, and user experience. It is not the best tool or technology on the market, but it does what it was developed to do. There are other possibilities, if you are willing to pay more. But Barracuda is the right solution for the problem in our environment.

A lot of companies pay for a good and comprehensive solution, but they usually only use 50 or 60 percent of what the solution offers. Barracuda is different. We use it 100 percent. I know what the Barracuda technology delivers for me and the value I get from it for what I pay and how I use it. It is that simple.

Barracuda Email Security Gateway is primarily employed for safeguarding emails, focusing on email security.

It can effectively combat phishing attacks, block spam, provide confirmation, and ensure operational manageability with a strong focus on product stability.    

The pricing needs improvement.

I have been using Barracuda Email Security Gateway for the past ten years.

I would rate the stability nine out of ten.

I would rate it eight out of ten. 

There are occasional delays in their response. They do not always reply on time.

Neutral

We often encounter challenges because each customer has unique network configurations, security hardening requirements, and specific solutions. This includes migrations and email address configurations, which need to be updated periodically to stay in line with the solution. Regarding deployment, I believe we can complete a few files quickly, but the implementation phase will require more time.

We consistently monitor service support to handle various customer services, and we have a team of five individuals responsible for managing different customers.

It is an expensive solution and I would rate it a five out of ten.

Overall I would rate it seven out of ten.