Cisco Secure Email Reviews

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We had another appliance (Axway MailGate) and switched because it was outdated.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.

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.

• 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 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.

• 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.

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.