Cisco Secure Email Reviews

We use it for email filtering, spam filtering, for phishing attacks, malware, and forged-email detection. We also use it for outbound message control, to filter attachments that are allowed to be sent and attachments that are not allowed to be sent. It's for data loss protection.

It saves a lot of time wasting. For example, phishing attacks distract a user's attention, and forged emails waste a lot of time. A user can lose data. This solution helps protect user data.

It blocks

• bulk marketing messages
• graymail
• spam

and provides advanced malware protection.

I would like to see sandboxing for email, where suspicious emails received by the system are analyzed through online services. Some vendors, like Fortinet, have this feature in their firewalls, the FortiSandbox.

It's a very stable product. We hardly have any issues. Issues are mostly around license activation and the like. It's a reliable product and very popular here in the Middle East.

It's scalable. A medium-sized business would go with a C370 while a small business would use a C190. We are able to migrate users from lower-level to higher-level products. Scalability is not a big issue for this product. The same configuration can run 500 users and 3,000 users.

The few times we have contacted technical support we have received very good performance from them. This is one of the strong points. They have very good technical support. They provide timely responses. Technical support is very good from Cisco for every product.

The setup is very straightforward. It's very simple to install. It hardly takes 30 minutes.

There is a strategy for deploying, like determining how many users' emails do you want to pass through it. There is a long document, we call it High-level/Low-level deployment. And after that we, pass emails through from the Exchange Server, incoming and outgoing, to configure the kinds of emails the product should filter.

A deployment requires a maximum of two people: One is a network engineer and one is an Exchange system administrator, so if he wants to he can configure rules according to his requirements.

Pricing depends on your environment and which model you want to buy.

You need redundancy. If you have a standalone setup there is a risk of failure. If that goes down you lose email communication.

We have deployed this product for multiple customers in the Middle East, in the UAE, particularly in Dubai. We have many customers using this product, mostly medium-sized enterprises.

The Cisco Email Security Appliance is being used as the primary email gateway for our datacenter. We use the Cisco Email Security Appliance to receive, send, scan, and filter our incoming and outgoing email.

We use the Talos Threat intelligence to filter out known 'bad' email sender. The Sophos Antivirus plugin for antivirus scanning and the DKIM signing for our outgoing mails.

The system enables end users to manage their own whitelists/blacklists and provides our service desk with the means to troubleshoot email delivery issues with ease.

On-box DKIM and DMARC features let us secure our email flows and reduce the risk of our domains being used for spamming.

Administration of the email domains and custom filters are easily done via the web interface.

The user interface could be updated. Better dashboards and more interactive overviews would be nice, but the current functionality is sufficient.

Three to five years.

The Cisco Email Security Appliance has enabled us to reduce spam by at least 30% compared to our previous solution.

We chose Cisco Iron Port as it delivers strong email security protection and our company needed it to protect the company's email systems from spam, email viruses, .exe files, unwanted email from unwanted sender etc. For this, we choose Cisco Iron Port c160. Cisco Iron Port is a solid 1U appliance, no need for additional hardware, easy to plug into existing network. Email channel protection worked across the board without regard for which email client we used. When Cisco engineers became aware of the XML file rule not working as designed they immediately recorded this in their internal issues database and provided us with an issue ID. More significantly, they quickly supplied a workaround that allowed us to block XML files using a different type of rule.

More than a few steps are required to apply rules and these are not essentially intuitive. Even though we were able to get real-time event information from the email logs, it would be nice if the higher-level journalism tools could synchronize more quickly. Price might be an obstacle for smaller networks. Need to reduce the price so that small organizations can use this product.

I have experience as an SE for IronPort as well as a private consultant. I have used this solution in multiple environments.

I have been able to help customers improve their email security, both new customers purchasing Cisco Secure Email Gateway, as well as long-time users. 

The most valuable features are Advanced Malware Protection, URL filtering, and of course Reputation Filtering.

The reporting functionality needs to be improved.

I have been using Cisco Email Security for nearly 15 years.

My primary use case was email security, to protect against phishing mails, spam, malware, and viruses. 

We used to get emails with viruses that would impact the business or we would get emails with malware. We were able to scan the email and clear it or block emails with viruses. That was the business justification. On a weekly basis, it was blocking about 2,000 or 2,500 emails.

It protects you, it protects your network, it protects you from phishing emails and malicious content and the like.

The most valuable feature was the anti-spam feature. You could set rules to block emails based on specific words like "pornography," "sex," "guns," "violence." That was one thing I liked about it. With the anti-spam, we didn't get all those emails.

Also, Cisco was scanning our emails with their own intelligence. I liked that.

Finally, the user interface was quite friendly, it was quite easy to use, unlike some other Cisco products. Anybody could use it. You don't have to be familiar with IT to be able to handle navigating it.

There were a couple of access issues.

Also, they need to keep their intelligence top-notch. I remember a particular phishing email that came through to my then-CEO. So they could improve on their intelligence.

One to three years.

It's quite stable. We didn't have issues because, when I think about the issues, they were from us. The two boxes were in cluster, so when the guys at the other site would start without telling us, we would get cluster error messages. Apart from that, it was fine.

In terms of scalability, I'm pretty much sure we could go as high as 1,500 users.

The support is great. It's one of the best, if not the best. If you have a particular issue, Cisco can SSH tunnel into your box and help you fix it. As long as we had a running contract, their response time was five minutes, tops. 

If you don't have a running contract but there is a security issue, say malware, for example, they'll respond. But if it has to do with hardware, they don't respond. They'll tell you to get a contract before they'll respond. It depends on what the issue is.

The deployment was quite easy. We wanted it with high-availability. It wasn't a greenfield, it was just an upgrade. The initial deployment had been done before.

The GUI is self-explanatory: If you want to block emails, you want to erase emails, you do the IP address configuration and what your DNS is. It's pretty simple, a very easy-to-use GUI. If you want to buy licenses, you want to check the status of your licenses, you want to check the status of your box, you want to check the environment, it's very simple.

The upgrade took me about 30 minutes for each box. It was just me involved in the upgrade.

The ROI is about business continuity. If you get hit by malware through an email, you'll understand. Email security is a must-have; not necessarily Cisco Secure Email Gateway, but email security. It can come from any vendor, as far as I'm concerned.

The licensing was not per user, the licensing model was per feature. You could choose anti-virus, anti-spam, etc. It was feature-based and charged yearly. Aside from the standard licensing fees, you have to pay for support.

After using Cisco Secure Email Gateway we used Trend Micro. The difference between them is just the vendor. There's really no difference. Same approach. It's the same technology. I would say Trend Micro is more granular. But overall, It's the same technology. I don't think one is better than the other. Who you buy from depends on marketing.

Email security is a must-have, and as much as the cloud providers will tell you they have security, from our own experience, the vendors' security products are a bit superior. The reasons I chose Cisco Secure Email Gateway are the interface is - it's easy to use - and the support is great. Also, it's nice to have another gateway, not just the Cisco Secure Email Cloud Gateway because it has proven not to be enough.

The organization I was working in where Cisco Secure Email Gateway was implemented had about 700 staff members, roughly 700 email boxes. There were no plans to increase usage of Cisco Secure Email Gateway at that organization. The reality now is that if your emails are on O365, O365 offers you some form of Cisco Secure Email Cloud Gateway. For most organizations, they're looking for business justification to keep Cisco Secure Email Gateway when Microsoft, for example, is offering cloud protection for your mailboxes on O365. In a case like that, you really don't expand business on Cisco Secure Email Gateway. Now that mailboxes are no longer on-prem, and the cloud provider is offering you email security, the way they sell is that you cannot say have your email on the cloud without paying for cloud security. There is really not much expansion on Cisco Secure Email Gateway from a business standpoint, if your mailbox is with a cloud provider.

I would give Cisco Secure Email Gateway an eight out of ten. We didn't get any malware, but a few phishing emails, maybe one or two, slipped in. There is really no vendor, in my experience, that I would rate at ten out of ten.

Our company was facing a problem of user complaints with network performance despite the fact that we used Cisco ASA and Cisco IPS. When we scanned the mail server with antivirus we found a lot of threats that couldn't be treated, so we need to use IronPort. Cisco IronPort mail security was very helpful by blocking threats, viruses, worms and Trojans from attacking the mail accounts and user PCs.

-Added cost and delay to the network traffic, but performance did remain stable. -Requires knowledge and operation time to manage an added security device to the network devices besides IPS and ASA.

Cisco IronPort is Cisco's new network access controller (NAC). Cisco IronPort email and web security products are used online with the firewall Cisco ASA and Cisco IPS to filter attacks, threats, phishing and data loss.

• Cost-effective since they do not require extra hardware • They are simple to plug into the available network • Protection of mail channel works well regardless of the email client used • Efficient to troubleshoot

• Requires several actions to employ rules • It takes time to harmonize information from the email log events with higher level reporting tools

Security risks presented by web-based malware, spyware and web traffic exposes organizations to compliance and productivity dangers introduced by improper usage of the web within the organization. IronPort allows visibility into the problem and an easy way to pinpoint policy offenders. It includes a user friendly interface and easy content incorporation, filtering and reporting infrastructure.