Cisco Secure Email Reviews

i'm usining it as frontal gateway for controlling and securing the mails flows to my on-premises exchange servers

This product has made my messaging platform more secure. it contain and extended security feature ,policy rules for filtering , and multiple engine for scaning add to that encription , security is very important for critical business with data inhouse.

after doing a third party pentesting, they found the security at a high level regarding the messaging security part testing,and the only recommendation they gave and need improvement is adding the sendboxing, for those attack ranked at zero day attack, which can't be detected.

knowing i'm using premium licensing, i checked the Advanced Malware Protection (AMP), which is on-demand feature, i found that, this feature act like a sendboxing

With each product release since 2012, they have continuously fixed our issues or complaints. In the beginning, it needed a lot of work. Now, we are happy with it.

More than five years.

It is currently stable. I will upgrading next year, but the current version has been working great for six year.

We have two people (system administrators) performing maintenance for the system and security part for the company.

Everything is fine with the scalability.

We have 400 users on this product, with two site, 2 physical appliance in one site and one physical appliance in the second site the three working as a cluster, and next year, we plan to increase our usage and move to the newer physical appliance version. because those we're using , are arriving to them end of life soon.

The technical support is good.

Right now, I am paying for it, but I don't use it because the solution is stable.

I have previously used McAfee, Kaspersky, TrendMicro, barracuda, websense.

The initial setup was complex because I have two sites with physical clusters. and i made it alone during the working hour without interruption.

The length of deployment will depend on the complexity of your infrastructure and your knowledge.

This product is the complete solution and the real deal.

I am using the on-premise version.

Cisco Secure Email is our primary gateway. We are a service provider in India. Cisco scans every email that gets into our system.

We faced a targeted attack. Most of our customers were targeted, but no one got the email. It was quarantined by Cisco. That is why we are still using Cisco.

The solution has no competition. ATP has been the most valuable in improving our email security posture. It has helped our customers too. The click-time URL protection is also valuable.

When we use multiple Cisco devices, we cannot manage the servers with a single UI. We must log in to each server for the management. We cannot manage multiple devices from a single UI. The solution has some inhibitions. They need to be finetuned.

I have been using the solution for 15 years. I am using the latest version.

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

We are supporting around two million mailboxes. I rate the tool’s scalability a seven out of ten. It is a multi-server architecture, and I have to manage them separately.

We hardly get in touch with the support team. Whenever we got in touch with the team, the support was good.

Positive

We are using both cloud and on-prem versions. The deployment took less than two hours. We keep a backup of the configuration ready. Once we implement the server, we just put in the configuration and start.

We do the deployment ourselves. We also do maintenance and troubleshooting. We have around 20 L3 engineers on our technical team.

The pricing is good. We do not have any issues. I rate the pricing a five to six out of ten. There are no hidden costs. We know about the additional costs associated with the tool.

We do not integrate the product with other tools. I will recommend the product to others. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We have around 500 to 600 users and we use it for services like Anti-Spam, Advanced Malware Protection (AMP), and scanning. We are also using also multiple content filters, and it's working pretty well for us. In combination with Cisco Secure Email Gateway, we are using Trend Micro.

Before we had Cisco Secure Email Gateway, so we had more spam emails. In fact, we had some other solutions in place, but there was more spam going to the Exchange Server when we compare between we didn't have Cisco Secure Email Gateway deployed and when we deployed it. We cannot say it's 100 percent, but we're covered for 90 to 95 percent of spam. No spam is going to the user right now.

We are using almost all the features because they are necessary to protect emails. The most valuable feature is the different content filters we are using, such as DKIM. 

The Anti-Spam feature is also valuable for us because, most of the time, we notice that what is coming in is spam, and the Anti-Spam filter works very well. That's one of the features we like most.

We would like to see more options for the customization of content filters.

Three to five years.

The stability of the solution is very good. They always come out with very stable versions of firmware and it has never caused any issues.

Cisco Email Security is working well for us, but we currently have no plans to increase usage.

Technical support is very fast to respond. They are well-trained and experienced.

We were using Trend Micro and we are still using it now that we have Cisco Secure Email Gateway. Cisco's solution is more efficient and provides more options. For us, it also creates one more layer of security.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The basic mail policies were very easy to set up, but tuning the email flow and blocking certain things according to particular requirements takes time.

The initial deployment took about a week. Our implementation strategy was not to stop the mail flow while implementing adequate security features, including Anti-Spam, AMP, and AV.

Deployment and maintenance requires one engineer, maximum.

We used an integrator. I was not involved directly.

Licensing is done yearly, but I am not involved with purchasing side of things.

Cisco Secure Email Gateway was our first choice.

This is a great product with wonderful support. You won't have any issues.

We use it to secure our email system, to cut down on all the bad emails that we would otherwise receive. 

The reason for implementing the product was the huge increase in spam and junk mail which occurred when we were adopting these devices. There have been some changes in the way that email is delivered since then, and one or two of the major spam sources have been taken down or prosecuted or jailed. Today, we have less blanket-spam, but we have more targeted phishing emails or spear phishing.

The combination of emails with links that encourage users to give away their user login information can cause problems. When someone's account is compromised it can result in access to our global address list and access to emails that the compromised user may have sent. Therefore, they have details of the format and the style emails that our company uses. We have communication threads that they can take advantage of because they can inject their fake emails into an existing communication thread and try to fool a supplier or client into giving more information or, worst-case, giving money to the wrong person.

When we first had Cisco hardware, we were having significant problems in that we were getting something like 10,000 emails per device per hour. We have four devices, so if we calculate that up it was like 1,000,000 emails a day, and most of those, about 99 percent, were junk mail or spam.

We had a major problem with email, and introducing Cisco Secure Email Gateway systems was a set change for us. It reduced the number of unwanted emails by a huge factor. That has continued to be the case, from when we first got the devices, until today.

Previously, we had other email security appliances, and they were overwhelmed by the volume of email that we are receiving as a company. The introduction of the Cisco Secure Email Gateway systems had two effects for us: 

1. They significantly reduced the number of emails that were even considered for delivery or for being accepted into our company for internal routing.
2. It gave us another line of defense. We use the Cisco Secure Email Gateway systems as our first line of defense which we then follow up by another manufacturer's email security appliance, which gives us a second level. Subsequent to that, we've adopted another layer of email security. So we now run three layers.

Initially, the most valuable feature for us was the SenderBase Reputation, because that reduced the number of emails that were even considered by the system by a huge number, before we ended up processing them to get through the spam, the marketing, and the virus-attached emails. 

Since then, customized filtering has been very effective and useful for us.

In addition, Cisco has developed the product with its Talos product. They've developed the Cisco Secure Email Gateway systems so that instead of just specifically stopping known spam sources and using that to stop virus-infected emails, the Talos solution which they're now providing has a lot of attraction because it helps to prevent phishing emails.

Things such as Sender Domain Reputation, which is a relatively new feature, are attractive because when there's a pop-up domain, which might be a look-alike of your own company domain, or it might be a look-alike for some other company like Microsoft, it gets a bad reputation, and the Cisco Secure Email Gateway systems will reduce the possibility of these emails delivering to the recipient's desktop.

We have occasionally had hardware problems because we are using an appliance-based solution, but that might change.

More than five years.

The system is very stable. We have had very little downtime and the system is, in general, reliable. 

We have occasionally had hardware problems because we are using an appliance-based solution, but that might change. We may consider going to virtual systems. In general, we have had a good experience with this product. The hardware, given occasional failures, has been very reliable. There is an upgrade process for keeping the system running with the most current, recommended version of AsyncOS. We have had very few problems where an upgrade has gone wrong. We've been very pleased with the solution.

The scalability is good because when you have appliances such as we have, if you have the infrastructure and the available resources, you can install additional virtual appliances. From the point of view of scalability, if there were a problem with performance, it is possible to add other systems or devices, even though they are virtual, and they all fall under the same control interface. They are all a part of the same cluster so they are all relatively easy to manage.

We currently have 11,000 employees and a large number of those users hold email accounts and email addresses.

We have a 24-hour operation because our company is located in 62 countries, so we have to respond relatively quickly because email is important. We have a department that deals with IT security and likely, at a minimum, we would have six people who have the capability to work on these systems. But in reality, because the systems are very stable, we have three or four people who regularly work on them. All the people who maintain the system are currently in the same department as me and all of them are considered IT security officers. They deal with other systems as well as the email.

Cisco's technical support is, perhaps, taking a different approach to the way that IronPort managed systems. Cisco tends to try and answer questions or problems by email more, initially, rather than talking to someone on the telephone. Sometimes that's not quite as good as IronPort was. 

But, in general, Cisco is good in that when we have a question they will respond quickly. But equally, because we've had these systems for several years, there is a good pool of experience in our security team so that we don't regularly have to ask questions of Cisco support.

We switched to using IronPort because it gives us a second line of defense from spam, phishing, and all the other problem emails. One of the reasons was that there was a major spike in the number of spam and junk emails that people were sending from when we first got these systems. 

The other system that we had was suffering from performance problems because it was being overwhelmed by the volume of emails that were being delivered to Fugro. The other product was still a good product, but it didn't have the performance to handle the volume of email. With the IronPort system being used as a first line of defense, it probably would have done everything that our previous system did, and we could have just removed it from our email processing.

However, we wanted to retain the old system because it had some nice features to do with additional email filtering. Having IronPort as a first line of defense was really good, and then, it was possible to do special filtering and other email reaping on this other system. The other system could then perform at a good level because it was not being overwhelmed by the huge volume of spam, junk, etc.

The initial setup was very straight forward. Having said that, we had a lot of experience in email systems before we set up these devices. But to get the most out of the functionality of the devices it took us some time to implement custom email filters. These were detecting targeted phishing email, although they weren't called that back in the days when we first got this type of hardware.

This was in the days before it was common to have virtualized systems. The systems we had at the time were probably the type that might have been considered by a small ISP. At the time it might have been Cisco Secure Email Gateway 310 or 320 systems. It was a long time ago. We have had those systems on contract since then. We've regularly upgraded the systems when the contract has been renewed.

We've had the systems configured in a cluster where the cluster spans more than one email gateway. Email gateways are located in different countries, so although we have different places where the email can be delivered to Fugro and from where Fugro sends email, the systems are all managed from the same interface and console, even though the systems are in different countries.

Because we had the systems before Cisco bought IronPort, we used some assistance from the then-IronPort company for the initial set up. But our own personnel were involved in training courses, so most of the configuration was done by Fugro people.

The IronPort consultants were very good. Because the company was keen for business, they were keen to assist us. At the time, we were, perhaps, one of the more unusual cases because of the quantity of junk, spam, and other types of emails that were being sent to Fugro recipients. IronPort, at that time, was very responsive, very helpful, easy to deal with and, usually, very knowledgeable about the product.

It would be fair to say we have seen return on investment using this solution, but I'm not the person who spends the money or places the orders so I do not have detailed information on it.

We did evaluate other options, but it was a long time ago so I'm not sure I can remember which other options we considered.

Having a good understanding of the product helps in the implementation process, so do some upfront training before you adopt the product. Be closely involved with Cisco support or the Cisco implementation team which will help to make sure that configuration is well adjusted and suited to your company.

I've used the product for more than ten years. Prior to that, it was IronPort. Cisco bought IronPort. We were using the IronPort products before Cisco bought them. We're currently using AsyncOS version 12.

We've used this product for so long, and we've been very happy with it, that we do not have a direct comparison against other products that are available today. That said, and accepting the fact that email security systems are not cheap, this product is still a front-runner and, combined with the new things that Cisco is doing, it has a lot of scope and capability. I would suggest this product would be about a nine, if ten is the best.

The primary use case was for email security and load balancing between Exchange mail servers.

From a security standpoint, IronPort really helped with the mail filtering and load balancing between the Exchange servers they had. IronPort enabled us to blockade domains that send these emails. IronPort gave us fantastic service.

By the time I administered it, I was able to block some 25 or more domains.

The filtering is something I found very valuable. 

Also, the users were able to do a check by themselves on quarantined emails. They could check if a valid email had been stopped, if it matched up with the SPF certification. The kind of environment we ran was a kind of complex environment. For us to be in compliance with PCI DSS and ISO 27001, the users needed to implement this and we needed to know how often we got unsolicited emails and how to mitigate users being victims of spear-phishing or phishing attacks.

One of the things that Cisco could improve on with IronPort is the support. Cisco doesn't really have enough engineers who have full, hands-on knowledge of IronPort. Knowledge of it is not something you can find easily compared to other security appliances. They could also share more technical resources on how to do conversions.

I did a video tutorial while I was training on CISSP and on CCIE security. There was a series that had the Cisco Secure Email Gateway in it and also the WSA. I was able to follow most of the configuration and explanation from the instructor.

Also, if Cisco Secure Email Gateway and WSA could be brought together, it would make a better appliance, one wholesome appliance.

One to three years.

From my perspective, it's pretty stable. We didn't have any issues.

It's scalable. In the enterprise in which I had to deploy it, there were between 500 and 1,000 users, so the scalability is quite okay. We had two Cisco Secure Email Gateway boxes and there was load balancing using Cisco ACE. The scalability is okay.

There weren't any plans to increase usage, as far as I can remember. It was used very well and they're still using it. I do interact with the current engineer now, and I don't think there has been a serious issue of late. The only issue he told me about is some outside mail is being trapped by the current site.

I did contact support once or twice before I left and that was during the license regeneration. We had an issue which was more like a wrong configuration. There were some steps that needed to be taken to correct it. Support was awesome, although it took a while.

Because I had a video walkthrough that I made use of, I found the configuration pretty easy, not so difficult. Also, the prior knowledge of my then-line manager gave me an edge, helping me with using and administrating it.

The deployment I did last was done within five to ten days.

IronPort has been in production before I got the job. They had issues because the configuration was not suited to the business. What I had to do was a clean configuration, reload it, and start the configuration all over again.

I and my line-manager were the ones who were involved. I did a larger chunk of the job. I was the only one maintaining it until I handed it over to the network engineer who took over from me. Maintenance takes one person or two.

It reduced the costs resulting from phishing attacks on the organization. That was one of the major reasons for deploying Cisco IronPort.

There were no other costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

So far, so good. IronPort was fantastic. It's an awesome solution, but I don't think it's something for a small-sized organization due to the licensing cost. I think it's a great solution for email security.

I would rate Cisco Secure Email Gateway at eight out of ten because of the awesome functionality and features. The only downside with it is the knowledge about it. When I was trying to enable cloud encryption services on it, allowing you to encrypt emails to send confidential emails to a third-party, the resources on that were not that grounded and the technology was somewhat difficult to configure. The way the technology works for email encryption services is not ideal because once you send an email to someone, he has to click on a link and be redirected to a web portal, rather than having everything done on his email platform.

It's pretty normal daily incoming and outgoing emails. We have customized policies based on our security measures using this tool to scan the emails in our inboxes. We also check all incoming emails.

Because we can customize policies with it, we have good documentation.

I can customize the configuration and policies.

There should be some type of help section that can help us configure clients' emails. Sometimes, we just need to customize the quality. 

The graphical user interface is not user-friendly like other vendors. I find it very difficult at times to find some options on the UI. 

It's very difficult to configure at that time. 

Three to five years.

I have had no complaints with the stability.

The scalability is quite good. We have three administrators using it. The product is serving around 2000 to 3000 people in our environment.

The technical support is quite good. Whenever I need them, I just raise a case, then someone responds. I have no complaints.

The implementation is quite straightforward, but the customization can is a bit difficult. It took us three hours to implement and three to seven days to configure.

Before implementing, we had to design a new program.

We had a partner who did the deployment and customization, who was very good. Also the Cisco support was there, so anything that we felt uncomfortable with, or when we could not understand policy, we just raised the case, and they helped us with it.

From our end, three to four people were involved in the deployment.

We are also using Sophos Email Appliance in conjunction with Cisco Email Security. We use them both together as a solution.

Overall, it is a very good product, and I'm very happy with it.

• Facility of management
• Documentation

We're now protected against spam emails.

We use the CLI for management, but it's not very good. It's based on Java and it's very difficult to use.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's very stable. We've had no issues with instability.

The scalability has been OK.

We had to configure it, but it wasn't complex.

We are using two security appliances. One is a web security appliance, IronPort, as well as the Cisco Secure Email Gateway. They are used for web surfing.

We need to differentiate among users with specific boundaries. Some users have full access and some users only have limited access. That is what we are using it for.

It integrates with Active Directory and we can limit specific users to using specific applications. 

I would like to see a cloud service implemented for IronPort with specific domains which companies register to blacklist. Emails or anything coming from those domains should be automatically blocked or automatically scanned. Cisco should implement a cloud service for IronPort. It should scan automatically, without our needing to say, "Scan this," or "Scan that." It should be done from their side.

Also, the hardware is not up to the mark. Two to three times a year we have complete downtime. There must be an issue with the hardware itself. The software is very good. It works really well, but when it comes to the hardware it's not good enough because of the downtime. That hasn't happened with any Cisco device until now.

Three to five years.

The scalability is really good for multiple users. There is no issue with the scale. We have 300 to 400 users.

Technical support is really good. As far as I know, whenever we need it, they help us very well. Within half an hour or an hour of our call, we get technical support to WebEx us, depending on the situation or the issue. That's pretty quick.

The initial setup was straightforward. There was nothing complicated. It doesn't take more than two engineers. When it comes to the software, if there is good coordination between a Cisco guy and an email-server guy, the two of them would be enough to implement it.

It was really easy to implement. Even a newcomer joining the company could easily implement it. There is nothing complicated in the device. It can be easily implemented without headaches.

We took a three-year license. In addition to the standard licensing, there is a cost for SMARTnet as well. That is necessary because the hardware device is not stable at all. So if anything goes wrong we have two appliances to use. With SMARTnet, Cisco will send a new device within a week.

We are looking for a solution. We are in communication with other vendors to integrate with Email Security or to provide us a new solution.

The Cisco Secure Email Gateway, in my opinion, is a really good device. In terms of configuration of the software, it's just click, click, and you are done. If you have redundancy then you are in safe hands. It's a very good solution for email security.

We could be changing the appliance. I have heard from someone that Cisco has released some appliances for email security. I believe we need to try this. We may change our existing device and move to a new Cisco technology. We would keep the software. We usually upgrade it based on the newest versions.

Until now, I haven't seen any breach or any attack on the Cisco Secure Email Gateway.

Overall, I would rate this solution at nine out of ten. I could give it a ten if the hardware was better.