Cisco Secure Email Reviews

The product is used for email security. We have around forty boxes of Cisco and cater to around four million users.

The strong point of the solution is that we hardly get any spam emails because of Cisco Secure Email. It has been a long time since I saw a spam email in my inbox.

Scalability has certain shortcomings and needs to be improved because there are service providers who provide better scalability.

Our company constantly checks out what the solution needs to improve. We need to be updated with what is available in the market and which application performs better.

The solution's UI needs little tweaking because most customers find it to be a very detailed and technically designed UI. If a person does not know email security or how Cisco devices work, he cannot manage it.

Other solutions are user-friendly. Even if the admin has a basic knowledge of managing the services, he can use them.

Cisco Secure Email needs to work on the security part, but it also needs to work on UI since it makes part of the entire solution.

I have been using Cisco Secure Email since 2010. My company is an email security service provider. I am using the solution's latest version.

The product is stable.

I rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten.

We have four million users using the solution. In India, we are a premium service provider of Cisco Secure Email catering to many institutions.

I rate the solution's scalability a six out of ten.

Cisco's technical support is good. I rate the technical support an eight and a half out of ten.

Positive

We have used Sophos and Mimecast before in our company.

The initial setup is very straightforward, but a new person needs to be trained to use this solution.

The solution has very good pricing.

I rate the pricing a ten out of ten on a scale where one means it is less cost-effective, and ten means it is the most cost-effective solution.

I recommend Cisco Secure Email to those planning to use it.

Around 40 administrators are required for maintenance.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Our customers use the solution as an email security tool.

The product blocks spam emails.

The scalability must be improved. The product is a bit traditional. There are many vendors in the market. A customer might not always choose Cisco.

I have been reselling the solution since 2010.

I rate the tool’s stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a seven out of ten. Our customers are medium and enterprise-level businesses.

I rate the ease of setup a seven or eight out of ten. The deployments takes one to two weeks.

I rate the product a seven out of ten on a scale where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

Sometimes, customers choose Forcepoint or Barracuda. Usually, if the customers have a Cisco setup, they choose Cisco Secure Email.

Cisco is an integrated solution. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

It is our email gateway. We have the Exchange Servers, but the Exchange Servers don't relay directly with the internet. We have ESA in-between, and every incoming and outgoing email must pass through ESA before it gets to the internet.

We are using Email Security Appliance C690, and we have three of them in a cluster. They are on-premise. We have decided not to go to the cloud. It is primarily because most of our clients are government agencies and the government, and they have this suspicion about the cloud. So, right now, we are still on-premise. 

Currently, we are on version 13.8. There is a newer version, but we are yet to migrate to that version.

We use ESA with Security Management Appliance (SMA). We have SMA M690. The integration of ESA and SMA makes the whole work easier. SMA is the central content appliance, and we have three ESAs. The SMA is able to collaborate with the clustered ESAs for log management and other things. It gives some stability in terms of what is happening. ESA keeps a lot of logs, so SMA is able to move through ESA and get those logs out. This integration has really helped us to drive our operation in the email platform.

It does a lot in terms of preventing phishing and business email compromise with DP and Advanced Phishing Protection. DMARC gives visibility for preventing spoofing and social engineering attacks. ESA has been able to help and protect us from those attacks. It is doing a lot of work. Gartner has always rated Cisco's ESA appliance as one of the major players.

It is doing a lot to prevent spam, malware, and ransomware. Everything is also tied to how you have configured it. Some of the spam emails don't get to the customers. We can quarantine a spam email, which gives us the visibility to look at it and see if it is actually spam or not. It is doing its work. It is. There are no false positives. It is working perfectly.

Email service is one of the services that we offer at Galaxy. ESA has improved our business. Our customers want to maintain their business with us for email security. We have over 500 domains on our email platform. It has improved our profitability in everything.

They have a lot of features such as Advanced Malware Protection, Email Protection, Advanced Phishing Protection, Antispam, Antivirus, and Outbreak Filters. They are very important.

It is doing its work. It is doing what it was actually designed to do. It has ensured we don't have business email compromises, and it has also ensured that our brand Galaxy is unique all year round. 

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.

Another challenge is that there is no way for me to know my level of utilization. For example, if I have a subscription of 2,000, there should be a way for me to know my level of utilization. Currently, I don't know my level of utilization. So, if my license is renewed on 20,000 subscribers and I'm using less than 20,000, I wouldn't know. It doesn't improve my ROI. If I'm using less than the subscription I've applied for, there should be a way the system should tell me, rather than me going to find out manually. When I go to the smart licensing profile, I should be able to see my utilization. I should be able to see that I've subscribed for 20,000 but I'm only using 12,000. This means that if I'm going to renew, I should reduce my licensing mode from 20,000 to maybe 15,000. This kind of information should be given to the customers, but right now, we don't have that.

I've been using this solution since 2017. My organization has been using it before that. It has always been in use as our email security gateway.

It is very stable. They have AsyncOS, which is the OS that runs on the appliance. They've released different versions. There is a general version, a limited version, etc. They keep coming with more services just to improve the platform. 

We never experienced downtime. We have ESAs, and they are in a cluster. If one ESA fails, there is no downtime. The remaining two can handles email communication and relay. We have high availability and redundancy. So, we don't experience any downtime.

We do ESA health checks with OEM during which they connect with us virtually. They connect to the device and then check if all security features are still well configured and if there is any other way to improve. Doing this quarterly has really helped to make sure that the appliances are up to date.

It is scalable.

They are very good. I would rate them a nine out of 10. If possible, I would rate them a 10, but I just want to be a little bit reserved. 

They've really been very knowledgeable and very patient, and they've always ensured that for any issue, any ticket, or any case that is opened with them, they are prompt. They are quick to ensure that they resolve an issue as soon as possible.

It has always been ESA from the onset.

I wasn't part of the team from the beginning to the end. I came when they were almost done. It was complex but also very interesting. It took two weeks or so if I'm not mistaken.

For the setup, you need to look at the low-level design and the architecture, and then you look at the network interfaces, listeners, routes, default routes, etc. If there is a way they can come up with step-by-step information about configuring it, that would really be nice. The guide right now is too cumbersome and bulky. If there is more straight-to-the-point and procedural information, it would be better. 

Cisco service engineers were the ones in charge. 

We have seen an ROI.

At times, we feel the pricing is a bit too high, but then, there is also room for discounts. We enjoy a lot of discounts, and that is why we are still with them. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We have evaluated other solutions, such as FortiMail from Fortinet, but we stuck with Cisco ESA. ESA's pricing and licensing were what led to us trying to see how we can bring it all together.

It is stable and credible. I would always tell someone else to try it out. Of course, before you try it out, you can look at what Gartner is saying. Gartner has always placed the Cisco Email Security Appliance up there along with Mimecast and other top players. 

It is well-secured. Security is everyone's concern, so I will always tell people to go for it. It is very secure. Its pricing has been a little bit high, but you can always ask for a discount from your account managers, country manager, or whoever is in charge in your region.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.

All of our inbound and outbound emails flow through the CES environment and we leverage it for spam filtering, phishing filtering, malicious URL detection, attachment scanning, and data leak protection. It basically covers all of the security layers for email.

It's cut down quite a bit on the amount of false-positive spam that we get. The spam engine that's utilized by CES, we found to be pretty effective. It's rare that things end up in a quarantine when they aren't supposed to be there, which is very beneficial. I believe that was one of the reasons that we moved from the previous hosted solution that we were utilizing to CES.

The malicious URL scanning, as well as the anti-malware features, have been really useful for us in our environment. Specifically, the URL scanning has helped to knock down quite a few phishing attempts that come into the organization. The broader blanket automated attempts get knocked down pretty quickly since those URLs typically get flagged early on, and then the appliance just picks up on those URLs and knocks them down. It is the same with malicious attachments. The malware scanning that's done via AMP, which is deployed elsewhere in the organization as well, just grabs all of that before it hits the inboxes.

We have our email security feeding into the SecureX solution and it's nice to have all of our security platform statistics in one place. We leverage quite a bit of the Cisco security stack and having all of that feed into the SecureX dashboard is great. The dashboard continues to evolve, but it is at least nice to be able to see everything at once.

Integrating this product with SecureX was pretty quick and easy. Both of the solutions are cloud-hosted and the SMA, which is the reporting module that feeds the data into SecureX, was done via the API. The documentation on the SecureX portal walks you through exactly how to add the various integrations.

We leverage the AMP functionality that exists in CES, and it also ties into threat response, which is the threat-hunting platform that Cisco has. The benefits of these integrations were pretty important in the decision to stay within the Cisco product family. The threat hunting and threat response are really nice because we're able to see if something malicious makes it into the environment. Once that happens, we are able to trace that back and find out if that was done via an email, and then grab the information for that specific message. This will tell us if there have been any other indications of compromise on any other hosts. When it comes to being able to do that, having it all in a uniform environment is pretty important.

The UI is definitely one area of improvement because it doesn't match other interfaces and the navigation can be a little clunky. Generally speaking, it is just dated, and I know that they're working on enhancing it for later versions.

They should continue to develop their integration with Office 365 or Hosted Exchange since a lot of organizations, ours included, are moving primary Exchange services to the Microsoft Cloud. Being able to integrate tighter with that environment is important.

I have been using Cisco Secure Email since joining the company.

We haven't had any issues at all with the stability of the platform.

With it being cloud-hosted, it can scale as wide as you need to.

We have roughly 1,000 employees and all of our inbound and outbound emails go through this system. This means that there are several tens of thousands of messages a day flowing through it. We haven't had any sort of performance issues at all with our environment.

Cisco's technical support is very good. We've just recently had a couple of tech cases that we needed help with. We were researching why some of our partner's messages weren't getting through intact. Because this is a hosted solution and they have quite a bit of visibility, it has always been great.

We've never had any issues with support on this platform.

In previous organizations, we've leveraged Postini, which was a cloud-based solution that was acquired by Google. I've also worked in environments that have leveraged Microsoft's Office 365 email spam filtering, and they've been good, but generally, usability is sometimes a problem. It goes back to the UI and then the accuracy.

The amount of spam that is stopped has not always been great. As such, I feel that CES has a pretty good balance in that regard.

As this solution is hosted on Cisco's cloud, we don't manage the underlying infrastructure.

We probably have about eight individuals who work with it. Some of them are within our support organization, there are messaging or Exchange admins, and there are network engineers.

Return of investment is something that is difficult to measure because you're essentially trying to prove a negative. It is difficult to say what it has prevented or what has been stopped from happening. That said, I think the overall satisfaction, at least from the user perspective, is good.

When you consider the spam and anti-phishing components, in addition to the IT benefit of the anti-malware and antivirus, I think we definitely get an appropriate return. Nobody questions the expenditure on the solution as being ineffective.

With respect to transferring policies and licenses, Smart Licensing has really improved the overall licensing model for Cisco. We've been really happy with Smart Licensing.

There are additional fees for adding features. For example, things like AMP are additional licenses. Because it's all done via the Smart Licensing portal, when new licenses are acquired they're dropped in our bucket, so to speak, and then the solution just grabs those licenses. There is no back and forth required. The license ends up in the bucket and then the solution syncs with Smart Licensing and we're good to go.

For the future, we are looking at moving to newer versions that allow for additional advanced phishing protection. That's something that we're targeting. Also, we're trying to figure out how to streamline our mail flow with the majority of our inbound and outbound email that is now flowing through Office 365. Essentially, we're figuring out how we can tighten up that integration and lessen our dependence on on-premises Exchange for our mail flow.

With respect to versioning, it is controlled by Cisco. I believe that version 13.5 is when they introduced the advanced phishing protection. We're notified when new versions are released and we can ask for earlier versions, but we get adopted once those versions become generally available.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to leverage the Cisco Validated Design (CVD) documents that exist. They're super helpful. Cisco has done a lot of work with Microsoft in figuring out integrations and documenting those. There is quite a bit of really good documentation, both within Microsoft and Cisco on building those integrations and configuring them.

We have also leveraged Cisco's adoption services around renewal times to make sure that we're using the platform to the fullest extent. They offer health checks for their hosted solutions, so on a yearly basis, you can sit down with an engineer and walk through and make sure you're on a good version of the code. You can make sure that you've again implemented from a high level, those feature sets correctly, and that you're leveraging things properly. Cisco does a lot of things to make sure that it's an easy renewal conversation to have, specifically with leadership.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from working with this product is to make sure that you're engaged with your Cisco teams to guarantee that you're getting the most benefit out of the platform. Again, you should be taking advantage of the health check services and adoption services because they're really unique.

In summary, this is a good solution but I think there's always room for improvement. I don't think that anything is perfect and they've definitely got some work to do on tightening up the UI and the configuration presentation. From a functionality perspective, the platform is great. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have it for email security. We use it for some security features to set up emails.

Cisco Secure Email has helped free up our IT staff for other projects because the product is so stable, and you don't have to spend so much time with the administration of the product. You free up time because you don't need to set up so many functions. Some of the functions are out of the box, and they just work.

There are a lot of filters for scam emails and things like that work out of the box. You can also use the antivirus features. I like its features.

Cisco Secure Email can be improved from the administrator's point of view. Usually, you have to work with different areas, and they can try to make it easy for the administrator to use different functions.

Its stability is perfect. It's very good.

We did grow out of the product, so we changed the product to a bigger box. It was the same installation and the same setup, so it was fine. We just replaced them with a larger box.

In terms of our environment setup, we have it set up in two data centers just for redundancy. We have about 1,200 people using it in the organization.

I've been in contact with Cisco Support a few times regarding questions, and I've had a very good experience with their support. They have been able to answer my questions directly, and they replied fast, so it's very good. Regarding Cisco Secure Email, I'd rate their support a nine out of ten.

Positive

When I first started at the company, the product was already there. That was my first experience with the product, but I liked the product, and I thought it was very stable and working well.

I've been involved in the lifecycle management of it and upgrading it, so I have experience with that. It has worked well with no impact on production or something like that.

The upgrade process is quite straightforward. You just have to ensure that you have everything prepared for the upgrade.

It was Cygate in Sweden from whom we bought the product. They were resellers for Cisco, but we installed it ourselves.

I don't have the insights into it, but compared to different products, it seems to have a medium level of pricing.

To those evaluating Cisco Secure Email, I'd advise thinking about what do you need and what is most important for your company in terms of stability and the administration area.

Based on my experience, I'd rate Cisco Secure Email a nine out of ten.

I use the solution for spam filtering.

The solution works well. Cisco claims to have the biggest threat intelligence database in the world. We trust them because they are enterprise-level products. If we are protected, then it is working well. I am satisfied with the overall performance of the solution.

The management features of the product are not up to date. It does not match the features provided by the new vendors in the market. The solution does not offer features to protect workloads on the cloud.

My organization has been using the solution for the last 20 years.

Support is not good. The support team provides a slow response. I rate the support team a six or seven out of ten.

Neutral

We pay at least 25% more for Cisco Secure Email than Trend Micro. Cisco’s support is better than that of Trend Micro.

The solution is expensive. Every additional workload or feature has an additional cost. The product should provide a single bundle for protecting both on-premises and cloud solutions. We do not have to pay for support.

We do not have the resources to review the product technically. It is very difficult to analyze these weaknesses. As an end user, we need something to defend us and block threats. If any product works with 95% efficiency, we can say that it works well. Email protection is very critical. No one should take risks.

Cloud protection apps are very critical to the business. They should be easy to configure and easy to manage. These days, there are hundreds of products available. It's very difficult to find a good solution. Just because a tool is popular, it does not mean that it will always be the best solution. The backend technique is very important. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and threat intelligence are very important.

If we have more knowledge, we can have more protection. If we don't have the knowledge, we can't. The solution does not offer a complete bundle for on-premise and cloud protection. If we need more features, they charge us more. They do not offer all features together.

Overall, I rate the tool a seven out of ten.

It provides good IT assistance. 

It is not user-friendly, and it is quite complicated. So, it should be more user-friendly. The GUI is difficult to understand. 

We have been using this solution for four years. We don't use the latest version of the hardware. 

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, it is good.

It is not scalable. For scalability, Cisco products are not good. That is the problem. And for deployment, it's a three-tier architecture system.

We have around 200+ users.

Cisco's tech support is good. But they respond very late. The support in itself is good, so there is room for improvement. 

The setup is quite complicated. It took us one week to deploy. 

The deployment was done by the consultant company.

As per market availability, this solution is more expensive than other vendors.

My company is looking for a new email filtering server or system. So, I was just making the comparison with Cisco and FortiMail, and that's what we're actually looking for a new or updated system. So this is the reason I was doing this R&D.

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

Cisco Secure Email's most valuable is email certification.

The product's GUI for the dashboard needs improvement.

We have been using Cisco Secure Email for one year.

I rate the product's stability a ten out of ten.

One administration executive in our organization uses Cisco Secure Email. I rate its scalability a ten out of ten.

The initial setup has medium complexity. I rate the process a five out of ten. We follow the Cisco guidelines for deployment. It requires two executives to conduct the process.

It is an expensive product. I rate its pricing an eight or nine.

I recommend Cisco Secure Email and rate it a ten out of ten.