Cisco Secure Email Reviews

We use Cisco Secure Email for email security.

The product stands out compared to other vendors in simplicity and ease of use. It is competitive and should be considered a user-friendly option. Its integration capability is good as well.

It would be beneficial to have additional DLP functionality, particularly in the email DLP aspect. It could be included in the next release of the product.

I've been using Cisco Secure Email for ten years. Currently, I'm using the latest version.

The stability of the product is a ten on ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

I've had a good experience with Cisco's customer service and support team. They respond immediately.

Positive

We have worked with Barracuda Email Security and Trend Micro Email Security.

We have deployed Cisco Secure Email both on-premises and in the cloud. One can use it as a private cloud solution or a virtual appliance in a cloud environment. The implementation and configuration process, including the dashboard, was user-friendly and straightforward. Along with it, the on-premises deployment was easy. It took less than an hour to complete.

It is a reasonably priced solution. I rate its pricing as a seven out of ten.

Cisco Secure Email is easy-to-use. I highly recommend it and rate it an eight out of ten.

We started using Cisco Secure Email because we had a lot of junk emails, phishing, and things like that. We wanted to secure the email sites for the end users.

It has had an impact on the awareness of the employees. Previously, a lot of employees were complaining about junk emails, phishing, etc. After using Cisco Secure Email, spam, and other things have been reduced drastically. I'm not sure how it filters them out, but it just learns based on the email subject and other factors. It just filters them and sends them to the junk box. There is an add-on, and if you think that an email is suspicious, you just add it to the add-on or move it to the junk box.

It saves time. Previously, we had to filter the emails and see which ones are junk and if it has been reported or not. There was a daily checking of the mailboxes to see what was going on and what had been blocked, but with Cisco Secure Email, all of that is just in one tab. You see all the emails that have been blocked and the reason they have been blocked. It saves a lot of time for us. It does the job that we need it to do. 

It's flexible. There are a lot of rules and policies that can be easily applied for certain employees or certain mailboxes.

If you are not a technical guy, it is hard to maneuver, but as soon as you work on it, it gets better and better. If there was a better way to know how to do things or how to find things, it would be good.

We have been using Cisco Secure Email for two and a half to three years.

It's stable. We haven't had any issues with it.

After moving from Exchange to Office 365, we thought that we needed to upgrade the license or do a couple of changes, but it was already a part of the plan from the product itself. So, it was easily scalable.

We didn't have to contact them. Our partner did all the jobs that were needed. It was part of the AMC, and since they set it up, it needed just a couple of tweaks when we shifted from Exchange to Office 365. All the support has always been through the partner. Our experience with them has been good. 

Based on my knowledge, its implementation was fast, and there were no issues when it was implemented.

We did a couple of PoC, and it was leading at that time in the market. We compared it to Barracuda and a couple of others. Its ability had set it apart from others. The partner was good, and the PoC was on point. It did what needed to be done. 

I would rate Cisco Secure Email an eight out of ten.

The big use case is filtering inbound messages for spam and malicious messages. Obviously, it's a huge issue for everyone to keep as much of that stuff out as possible.

Users are getting a lot fewer malicious and nuisance messages. When we moved to the cloud product, we added in a service for graymail unsubscribe which we didn't have before. That makes it very easy for people to safely unsubscribe from mailing lists, especially the sort that they have been added to without knowing what the company is. That has reduced the amount of time users waste going through that process and the amount of time IT has to spend responding to questions about what they can do about things like that. In general, it's enabled us to spend less time addressing user issues regarding junk mail. It has also been better about not blocking legitimate messages, which again comes down to saving time for both users and IT.

The migration from the on-prem email security to its cloud email security saved us money, versus where we would have been if we had kept the on-prem with them. Versus the Microsoft service, it was basically a wash. But compared to Cisco's on-prem service, the cost is the same, but you don't have to pay for the hardware and you don't have to maintain the system, as far as upgrades and hardware failures are concerned. It is cheaper to operate on their cloud service than it is to operate with their on-prem service. The hardware savings are from whatever level of hardware we ended up not having to buy. If we had stayed on-prem with it, we would have needed to buy two new appliances that year, appliances which would have cost $10,000 or $12,000. I don't have a good figure on how much manpower we spent maintaining upgrades with the on-prem. It wasn't huge, but we probably save an hour a month, on average, on maintenance.

For maintenance, it depends on what's going on, but there may be a few hours a month for reviewing, reporting, and for addressing any user issues. User issues mainly revolve around things like, "Okay, the user hasn't gotten an email from so-and-so. Check and see whether or not they've got it." But as far as actually maintaining it, to ensure it keeps functioning, it's pretty minimal; maybe an hour a month. The people who handle the maintenance are from our infrastructure group, which is a combination of systems and network functions.

A few of the big features are ones that we found that we missed terribly when we moved over to Microsoft. One of them is simply the logging that they have in the reporting. For example, if I wanted to get logs about emails since last week, from a certain address, with native Office 365 I would have to submit the search requests and I would get an email a few hours later with the results. With Cisco, it's not only a lot more detailed information, but it's nearly instantaneous. So if you have to do any sort of research into an issue, whether it's security or something is missing, it makes that much less labor intensive.

The filtering is definitely better at catching both spam and malicious messages, and there's a lot of extremely granular ability for setting up rules. You can do it the way you want to. The Microsoft solution tends to be pretty limited in how it allows some of that to be done. It forces you into doing it a certain way, even if it's not good for your business process.

The interface is dated. It has looked pretty much the same for 15 years or so. It would be helpful to be able to do everything from one spot. The centralized quarantine and reporting are completely separate from policy administration.

We used it consistently from 2007 to the beginning of 2020, and when we went off of it, it was about three months before we started back up with the cloud option.

We haven't had any stability issues with it. It seems to be good.

I haven't seen any scalability issues. I'm not quite sure how scaling would be handled if we had a truly immense increase, but I haven't seen any challenges with it. We're on the small side so we may not be a good example.

We don't really intend to change our usage much. We use it for all of our inbound and outbound email.

I haven't talked with their technical support much in the last few years. The only issue I've had was a support case for getting command-line access set up. That was fine, but there was virtually no contact about it.

We have had two runs with Cisco Secure Email. We initially ran it on-prem and that started in 2007. It was the same year, or a little bit before, Cisco bought the old IronPort product. And last year, we initially ended up dropping the on-prem, when we were moving into Office 365. Although we were happy with it, the thought was, "Okay, if we move everything to Office 365, Microsoft can handle that. We have their full-blown mail filtering products." We thought it would probably save us some workload, not having an extra product to deal with.

The intent was that we were going to consolidate to a single product when we moved to the cloud for email, and we found out that it didn't work as well as we had expected. We didn't do a direct conversion from the on-prem to the cloud solution. There were a couple of months between it during which we tried the Microsoft option.

We then found out that they were not nearly as good as one would expect from a market leader in corporate email. I then contacted Cisco about what it would cost to do it in the cloud with their products. I was rather surprised to find out that they don't charge anything more to host it, than they do to have you run it on your own equipment. We ended up jumping back into it with their hosted solution, without really planning to. When the cost came back and was as attractive as it was, we decided, "Okay, this Microsoft filtering is not working out. Let's go back to Cisco." We went back to it and it's been working really well, better than it did when it was on-prem, because we don't have to maintain as much of it.

We had been using encryption on Cisco before, but we did end up leaving that with Microsoft, just because it integrates with their Outlook browser better. I'm at something of a toss-up on which one I prefer. Because the Microsoft solution integrates directly with the Outlook client, it is a bit easier for users to manage. But the encryption on it seems to work fairly decently, although it has the same problem that all of them do. There are tons of standards for that. Everyone has their own. It would be great if there was some sort of multi-vendor standard for that but, without it, we moved it over to the Microsoft solution and that seemed that to be a little easier for users.

Because we had those few months in between, we didn't qualify for a license transfer. We had let the initial service lapse and then we brought on the cloud service.

It ended up being a really easy setup for the Cisco cloud product. I was pleasantly surprised how much was already ready for you out-of-the-box.

I found the setup to be straightforward, as someone who was familiar with the management environments. If I had not had the experience with it, there would have been areas that could use more documentation to explain what different sections of the product do. But I had been using it for a long time, so that was not an issue. But I could see that is an area they could put more into. We also had a technical contact available to us for when getting started, to whom we could reach out. But it would be good to add in some more entry-level documentation.

As far as the policy setup goes, our equipment was end-of-life and we weren't at a version that we could migrate from. So we decided to do greenfield for the setup and we're actually happy we did because Cisco's default setup on its cloud product, when they brought up a new blank instance for us, had a really good framework for rules, et cetera. We copied in exception lists and the like from our existing setup and we were up and running in an afternoon.

When we went in, we initially did it as a trial, because they offered a 30- or 60-day trial. We did that to see if this was what we wanted to do. We ended up poking around in the environment a little bit first, because the whole thing was an unbudgeted change for us. When we moved over to Microsoft we found we were having all these issues. We put some resources into trying to resolve them but we saw there were deficiencies in Office 365, when it comes to the filtering of email. We started the trial with Cisco to see if going back to them and their cloud would solve things. We liked what we saw and decided to move everything over. The grass really was greener on that side.

The downtime involved in the migration from Cisco's on-prem solution to the cloud email security was minimal, about 15 minutes. The downtime aspect wasn't especially important since we did it after hours. It's emails, so it's not like anybody was going to notice that it was down for that amount of time.

The learning curve involved in migrating from the on-prem to the cloud email security was pretty easy. The environment really is very similar to manage in the cloud. If you look at the management consoles that you're used to seeing on-prem, and you look at the ones in the cloud, about 99 percent is the same. There are some things that are unavailable because Cisco is handling the software upgrades, but almost all of it that you had on-prem is the same. There are a few extra steps to getting into the command line, they're a little bit weird, but all the policies are identical to the on-prem method. There's not much learning curve involved in switching.

Overall, the migration was massively easier than I expected it to be. We did it on a Sunday afternoon and it only took about three hours.

We were in touch with the technical contact from Cisco for some basic stuff, for getting started.

We were just evaluating between Cisco and Microsoft's advanced threat protection.

We decided not to evaluate anyone else when we saw that Cisco was going to be less expensive than we thought it was going to be. My expectation going in was that the cloud service would cost more than the licensing for on-prem would, because they're hosting it. But that wasn't actually the case. It ended up costing about the same as what the on-prem cost, except that we didn't have to buy hardware anymore, which obviously saves some money.

It's definitely worth looking at Cisco's cloud email security offering. It's surprisingly simple to get going with, and it really is easier to use than the on-prem because of everything they have built into it. It is surprisingly cost-effective.

It's integrated with their AMP product, although that's sold as a part of it. We haven't integrated it with other Cisco stuff at the moment. We've got third-party stuff that we have it integrated with. 

We are using it for our email gateway security for all our inbound and outbound email. We use a lot of the URL filtering and spam filtering as well as the dictionaries, e.g., if they try to spoof employee names.

We didn't have an email gateway initially. As spam was ramping up, the junk was getting through. So, we needed a gateway. We then worked with a local company who sold us this product and some training as well as how to get it up and running, configuring it. Over the years, they have been constantly changing it.

We use a lot of their search features to search for emails that have come through. Our end users come through it. They say, "This didn't email didn't arrive," or "How did this email get through?" So, I am constantly searching through message tracing and using that all the time.

I use the search all the time. Sometimes, it is hard to search for things and things are hard to find. People come to me all the time, saying, "This email didn't get through." Then, I go searching and don't find it on the first search. You have to think about alternative searches. I don't know if there is an easier way that they could help to find things. I don't know how they could simplify it, because now everybody else is using the cloud and everything is coming from Office 365, or whatever. It is just not the same environment from years ago where everybody had their own server and you could search easier.

When you run a trace and you are in the cloud, it's harder. You run a trace and it generates trace results. I haven't figured out how to get those off of the cloud. I don't know if there is a path to open up a ticket on that.

Before it was purchased by Cisco, we had already been using IronPort since 2005 or earlier.

It is very stable. We have never had any problems.

The way we are using it now, it does require maintenance. I decided to take a zero trust for URL links coming in emails or unknown links. Then, if there is a link that somebody wants to get through, then I have to add that to the list to allow it. So, there are some dictionaries and things to maintain the way we are running it now that we didn't have in the past. For many years, we got it running, then forgot about it. It just ran and ran. Now, I think it is just a different environment due to the level of phishing emails, etc. 

The way that we are running it now, there is more to maintain, like the dictionaries and the list of employees, so somebody doesn't spoof an employee's name. It takes maybe an hour or so a week to update the dictionaries and things like that. 

Right now, I'm the only one maintaining it.

The scalability is good. It seems like it still has capacity in the cloud. It is hard to tell in the cloud. However, the ones that we had on-prem were running real close to their limit for whatever reason: memory swapping and CPU utilization. So, we had to do something there. Right now, it seems like there is capacity/room to grow.

The solution protects 450 users. We plan to gradually increase users.

They have always been good when helping with problems. They are responsive and always come up with an answer.

We migrated from Cisco ESA to Cisco Cloud Email Security. 

The appliances were getting close to the end of life. They were using a lot of CPU, so it was time to do something with them. IT management seems to be going more to the cloud now, so it made sense to go to the Cisco Cloud solution. The machines that we had on-prem were really slow. For whatever reason, they were getting real slow. When we went to the cloud, we got away from that problem.

For the initial deployment, we might have spent a week getting it up and running. Then, we went for a day or two to training.

There wasn't really any downtime involved during the migration from our on-prem to Cisco Cloud Email Security, which was important to us. We didn't want to interrupt email flow. So, we prepared it, then there was a cutover. 

The migration from the vendor’s on-prem to Cloud Email Security wasn't too difficult.

A few times, we needed Cisco's expertise in the migration process to solve some problems for free. Because it is in the cloud, you can't get to the command line interface to access and download/upload files. So, I had to rely on Cisco for that.

There is a huge return compared to if we didn't have a gateway appliance, as far as blocking malicious emails.

The licensing was all transferred. A fair amount of the configuration had to be done by hand. We didn't transfer the people safe list and block lists. There were a number of things that we didn't transfer because they were in the cloud. It was a matter of going through and reconfiguring.

The familiar user interface was important in our decision to migrate from Cisco’s on-prem to Cloud Email Security. We have a lot of other projects going on. Being able to migrate to something that we were already familiar with versus migrating to Proofpoint or something else was a major decision factor. I didn't have to invest that much time, resources, and learning in a whole new product.

If you compare it over Proofpoint, it was a big savings. It was very competitive. It saved us from buying new appliances. Though, I don't know that would have been a big expense, because I didn't do a cost analysis of staying on-prem and replacing the appliances. We were more comparing the solution to Proofpoint, and the cost was considerably less than Proofpoint. It was already in place and working for us on-prem. So, I didn't want to move to Proofpoint because there would have been much more to learn.

Some of the things that we were doing in Cisco, we can't do it the same way in Proofpoint, from as much as I have looked at it. I know there is a difference. They have different solutions. They have some solutions that aren't configurable at all, such as, the lower price ones. They have another one where you are just like a tenant and everybody gets the same thing, then for it to be customizable, it is a lot more expensive. In orders of magnitude, it is more expensive than Cisco, which didn't make sense. With all the little tweaks and customizations that we're doing, I couldn't see how to do that based on the time I spent looking at Proofpoint. It might be doable, but I didn't figure out how to do it. So, I think Cisco is a little more configurable than Proofpoint for tweaking. I could be wrong, but that is my impression.

There wasn't much of a learning curve involved in migrating from Cisco’s on-prem to Cloud Email Security because they are very similar. There were just a few things that were different.

It is a good product. Be prepared to invest time in learning it, like anything. You need to have somebody who is a key administrator, like any enterprise-level product that you would bring in. Even if you will have Salesforce or whatever, you need to have an administrator who knows how to keep it running.

Email threats just keep getting worse and worse, so you need to keep on your toes.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).

It is easy to use. It is not widely used, but it is not tough to understand. Usually, it takes five to six months to become an expert in that particular product because there is not much in it.

The Cisco database is more bug-prone and less accurate than the databases of other email security solutions. Whenever we get a phishing email, Microsoft email server, TruePoint, or Barracuda, they have a much better database. Because Cisco is using Talos, which is not a good database, they do not have much information in the database. So that is really lagging very much behind.

So that is not much recommended by the customers. Every time, customers get frustrated by using them.

There's room for improvement in the DevOps database. It has many spam emails. Usually, we have to report to the Telos team for samples, whether it's spam or a legitimate email. If that is done, then the customer environment won't get compromised easily because more than 80% of cyber-attacks are through emails. So email is like sanitizer it was used in hospitals before COVID, but after, it's provided widely to users.

I used this solution for a year. 

I would rate the stability a six out of ten. We had multiple issues with the stability. Usually, the customer complains that there's an email coming from an outside sender, and it enters our environment, and our email gets multiple emails from a single sender. There might be suspicious emails or multiple things that we usually get from customers.

I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten. Cisco has to improve its database because email security is something like DNS servers. So we have to improve the database and put more information initially in it. 

The initial setup is easy. It starts with the VLS for Open IT. Initially, the host access table is there in the front end. Based on that, we can filter out traffic with IPs from the scale of -10 to +10 if it applies. If you want to whitelist an IP, you need to check the IVRX code. If that code is okay, then we provide a list based on the organization. 

It's a bit easy to handle Cisco Secure Email; it's not that difficult. For the logs, which are in PDF format, it's not hard to read them. We don't need Wireshark much to analyze the logs.

Usually, it's GUI-friendly, and also, the Relics are there on the GUI. We can create some relics, or it's automated from the backend by the development team. We just put in our initial setup requirements, and based on that, we create a red x rule. Then we can implement it into the message filter, and we can handle whatever we want, whether it's blocking emails coming from spam or anything else.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. Once you have hands-on experience with it over a period of time, you will get hands-on experience, and you will be able to understand it. It's easy to use, not that much complicated.

It is just another level of protection that we use, as far as email is concerned. We use it for different policies or as another scanning engine, e.g., on the desktop or for data coming through another email gateway.

At one point, there was a zero-day attack. The Cisco appliance detected it and stopped it, helping us out. We avoided the attack and potential damage.

The most valuable feature is the policies or rules that you can put on it. This definitely helps with routing specific things to different destinations within our organization, or even potentially blocking when something is coming in and out, to where you can't do this on an email server or on our other email gateway. It's just not possible.

On their roapmap, they are looking to integrate with different cloud features, like Office 365.

I would like them to add some clustering or high availability features.

More than five years.

It is very stable. I haven't had any issues with memory or CPU. I haven't had any unstable performances from any of the appliances. Initially, we had physical appliances, then we went and upgraded to virtual appliances at some point. However, even the physical appliances were pretty stable.

I did run into one issue at one time where I had to shut something off. It was a bug, but being down for an hour or two is just two costly for our firm.

Deployment and maintenance is handled by two people (email engineers).

Scalability is good. We have four appliances total clustered, two in one data center and two in the other. The ability to increase is definitely doable, and it's helpful if you need to do that.

We are a legal firm with close to 2000 employees.

Technical support is definitely good. The turnaround time to speak to someone is very good, as well.

We had another appliance (Axway MailGate) and switched because it was outdated. Also, their support model wasn't that great. They were difficult to get a hold of after six or seven in the evening.

The initial product setup was easy. However, it was a bit more complex on our side because of some of the rules that we had set up on a previous appliance, which was not Cisco. Trying to match some of those to Cisco was a little complex. We had some consultants help us out with that. Overall, it wasn't too bad.

The deployment took three to five days.

We worked with a partner consulting firm, Presidio, who very useful and helpful.

We did a proof of concept first off, then did a hard cut over on the weekend.

For what you get for the product, the support, and the overall stability, it is definitely a good return on investment.

We do annual licensing for Cisco Secure Email Gateway and SMA together, and possibly SmartNet support. Packaged together, the cost is just under $38,000.

We looked at two or three different vendors. One of the solutions that we looked at was a virtual Linux-based appliance. We did evaluate that and a proof of concept around it. However, it wasn't as robust as Cisco, as far as features and high availability.

Give it a chance. If you can do a proof of concept somehow to rate it against other competitors which are out there, look into it because it is a good product.

I haven't upgraded to version 12 yet.

I use the solution for email security. 

The tool comes with AI features. It is good for clients who already use Cisco products due to integration. 

Cisco Email Secure's pricing needs to be less. We have vendors who provide cheaper solutions with the same features. 

I have been using the product for half a year. 

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

I rate Cisco Secure Email a nine out of ten. 

The tool's technical support team answers queries quickly. 

Positive

Comparing Microsoft Defender and Cisco's Email Secure service, partners have noted that while Microsoft Defender offers email security, the tool's additional layer of protection provides further defense against threats like spam and phishing emails. The AI features filter out phishing emails. I have worked with FortiMail and Barracuda before Cisco Secure Email. 

The product's deployment is easy in a cloud environment. You don't need to install it for the Office 365 product. 

Cisco Secure Email is more expensive than other products. I rate it a five out of ten. There are no additional costs. You only need to pay the subscription amounts. 

I rate the overall product a seven to eight out of ten. 

It's our primary enterprise email gateway. It's the first stop for edge email security.

One of the things that I like most is that, since we do have a Cisco Enterprise agreement - we have a lot of Cisco products - we're able to consolidate reporting a lot better. Reportability is a lot more end-user accessible, or easier to acquire. The solution overall does what it does, but being able to quantify that, put it into reports that are easy to analyze, is probably the best and the largest gain that we acquired in switching.

One of the nicest things is that parts of it are highly intuitive. For instance, black-listing, white-listing, and things of that nature are very easy to do and they're very intuitive. You wouldn't even need any training to be able to perform those actions straight out-of-the-box. 

Even though it's not perfect, it has the IMS engine, Intelligent Multi-Scan engine, and it does a good job, right out-of-the-box, of blocking the vast majority of things that should be blocked. Again, it's not 100 percent, but out-of-the-box I didn't have to touch it, I didn't have to tune it, I didn't have to tweak it. I believe it leverages the threat-intelligence database and does what it needs to do in making sure that the bad stuff stays out and virtually all of the good stuff makes it through.

We find bugs, just like anyone else. We bring them to Cisco's attention. 

If there was one area I would like to see improved it might be having someone who can help us when Cisco comes out with a new product. Let's say I'm going to be purchasing and utilizing version two of this product. They assign me an account specialist and a technical specialist to help with the bring-up. It would be nice if the specialist would be able to help foresee some of the issues we might run into, specific to the version we're implementing. I know that's a bit of a loaded issue because sometimes it depends on your particular environment. I know that's very difficult.

But, there have been some instances where particular hiccups could have been avoided if the individual assisting us was slightly more versed in the version that we were going with. Maybe he could have told us that it wasn't the version we should have gone with. Maybe we should have gone with a previous version and then skipped over this version until they came out with a more upgraded version of it. The version we first chose might be a stable version in general, or it might be stable for other environments, but not for our particular environment.

There's one other thing I would like to see. It would be nice to have an easier way to check on the health of the system, how stressed these appliances are. Sure, you can do it, but it would be helpful to have an easier way to do it, maybe even at a glance. That was something that Proofpoint had that I wish I had here. That would be very useful.

One to three years.

It's been stable. I don't have to do anything with my email gateways. They chug along and they do what they do. They don't always get it perfect, but I have never had one fail on me. And I've never had a problematic appliance that I'm aware of. We had Proofpoint for a lot longer, but if I were to compare the percentages, I would have to say that the stability of Cisco appliances is superior to that of our previous Proofpoint environment.

We haven't had to address scalability. The umbrella IronPort is broken down into two halves: email security and web security. I haven't had to deal with the scalability of the email security at all. But since they're both under IronPort, I have had to deal with scalability on the web security end. Relying on some of that experience, my assumption is that the way it worked for the Web Security Appliances is probably pretty similar to how it works for the Cisco Secure Email Gateway. With that in mind, I can say that scalability is not an issue. It's as easy as just bringing another Cisco Secure Email Gateway into the cluster.

In terms of plans to increase usage, if you ask any enterprise they're going to tell you, "Yes, of course, we're going to grow, and as we grow we're going to use more." And the reality is, any growing enterprise is going to utilize email more and more. As the landscape morphs and changes, so do your rule sets and the features available to you on these appliances. Will we be using it more and more? Absolutely. Will it be a daily thing? Absolutely. I'm in these appliances every single day, taking a look and tuning where necessary and trying to find more efficient ways to handle the email traffic flow. It's safe to say that for any enterprise that's going to be the case.

We were using Proofpoint and then we switched to Cisco. As I mentioned above, reportability was one of the main reasons we switched, but the biggest one was cost. If you can get an equivalent functionality for a better price it's wise to do so. That's what our primary decision came down to: We could get equivalent functionality at a lower price point.

There were definitely parts that were straightforward. The initial bring-up of the gateways was actually cloud-hosted and was done primarily by Cisco. There were definitely aspects of it that I didn't even have to touch and it was wonderful. They just did it for me and that was great. 

When I took over administration there were aspects that were definitely easy and intuitive like the basics of being able to set blocks and set allowances when you have false-positives and false-negatives. It kept the basics simple. 

Of course, just like with any enterprise technology product, it can get as complicated as you want it to. There are a lot of granular controls that you have the ability to tune, but doing so requires more in-depth knowledge and more in-depth training and making sure you know what you're doing. Otherwise, you can end up doing things you never intended to do.

The initial bring-up, the initial switch from Proofpoint to Cisco, was pretty quick. We had a little bit of redundancy but the overlap was a couple of weeks at most. I would condense it down to about a week, because there was one week where it was mainly status updates. As far as tuning the appliances and tuning the filters go, that's an ongoing process for me. I still do that today.

In terms of implementation strategy, you want to minimize downtime, so it's important tor run in parallel for a little while. Thankfully, we had the ability to point some test traffic to the new appliances before moving the rest of the enterprise over. So it was:

• run in parallel
• send test traffic to the new Cisco gateway appliances, to make sure that things are flowing the way we'd expect them to 
• and then we staged it a little bit more. 

We accept emails from multiple domains and we moved our primary domain last. We started by moving over some of the lesser-used domains to verify things were okay and then moved over the primary domain last. It was a typical implementation that most people have: Run in parallel until you verify, and then move everything over.

Regarding staff for deployment and maintenance, right now it's just me, but it's unwise to have just one. What happens if I get hit by a bus? To do this properly you would need at least two. 

In an enterprise you end up with a myriad of email hiccups. Email hiccups are one of the most common. Being on the information security team, you have to look at it in a multi-faceted way. That means I'm not just looking at the flow of data. I'm also having to analyze the contents of the data and then start to determine whether I need to dig further into it to see if this particular message possibly went to multiple recipients. That's the investigative piece. The administrative piece is a given, but then you also have an investigative piece on top of that. That can be a lot to do, it could be an overwhelming amount for a single person to try to do. That's especially true when something does happen. 

One person is probably going to be consumed with trying to do all that. Is it doable? Sure. Is it advisable? No.

Since we are using Cisco cloud appliances, we had to have Cisco's involvement. They brought up the cloud appliances, where the initial configuration is done, and then we were the ones who started doing the final configurations, the moves and the migrations, as we entered the testing phase. We then moved more toward the final production move.

In terms of our experience with Cisco reps, I can speak on it more broadly as well, not just from a shear email-security perspective. When implementing a Cisco product, they're great in those initial stages. You get that expert help and it's a relatively smooth bring-up. For the things that go wrong, you have a Cisco person working with you who has the answer or knows who to go ping to get the answer. It's really nice.

That changes a little bit as time goes on. Once that expert is no longer helping you with your initial bring-up, then you rely more on the vendor's support matrix to get your solutions further tuned and to work out the little wrinkles as you experience them. Of course, it is universal - I haven't seen an example where this is exception - that this process is less smooth. 

As far as initial bring-up goes with Cisco, it's very smooth. Once that expert is no longer working with you on the bring-up and you run into issues and need to get help, that's less smooth. It's less smooth in that when you call any vendor's support line you get varying degrees of expertise. The same challenges are experienced with any international company where there could potentially be language barriers, based on where your call gets routed for support. That can slow the whole process down a bit.

That's just a reality of today's world, but it's workable. Unfortunately, it's a rather normal thing but there are different skillsets depending on the individual you're talking to, and then, depending on what the issue is and how complex the issue gets, your time to resolution may end up dragging out a lot longer than you had originally anticipated.

Our top-three choices were considering staying with Proofpoint, as well as Cisco, and Microsoft. We were looking at the bigger names.

In retrospect, I would probably want to talk to someone like myself. I'm now using Cisco security appliances and I can see how someone like me in another agency would benefit from talking to me about: "Hey what do you see? How's it going? What have your experiences been with the product?" If you can, find someone who is actually using it and talk to them.

In addition, it really depends on where you're coming from. The learning curve is going to be there regardless, because it's a new product. But if you're coming from a smaller email security platform up to this one, the learning curve is going to be steep. You may actually want to invest the time and the money into some additional training. Don't neglect that because if you just try to rely on Cisco support you're going to notice pretty consistent slowdowns. If that's okay, then it won't be an issue. Of course, it's always okay until something urgent comes up. If you're trained up, you can handle it yourself. Nobody knows everything, but it's in your best interest to know as much as possible.