Cisco Secure Email Reviews

For our primary use case, we use Cisco Secure Email to handle email traffic coming from external sources to internal mailboxes. It focuses on email protection, ensuring that unwanted or malicious links do not get opened. Any suspicious links that attempt to download on users are avoided, and attacks originating from emails get blocked at the Email Security Gateway.

My favorite feature of Cisco Secure Email is the threat intelligence capabilities, particularly its integration with Cisco Talos. By receiving feeds from various stakeholders, it provides faster detection of attacks. The integration with the Email Gateway is crucial for detecting email activities. It also possesses multiple modules for spam detection, malware detection, and threat intelligence, which are valuable in categorizing emails and determining actions.

We would have the product at the edge, passing it off to another service like Postfix. It was a platform that allowed us to sell a service to customers, enabling certain clients to email us securely. We used it to take everything through email security, which included policies allowing specific emails from certain domains.

It provided a platform to sell a service to customers.

I use the solution in my company for email security. The tool is the email gateway we use for email security in our company. Cisco Secure Email acts as the first level of defense in our company's email security flow. When an email arrives, it first arrives in Cisco Secure Email Gateway, after which it gets filtered there, and then it passes through our Microsoft 365 Defender.

The tool's most valuable feature in preventing security breaches revolves around the area of malware protection that the product provides. I don't use the product much for URL filtering or spam filtering since you need to work with the configuration a lot.

Originally, Cisco Secure Email was primarily intended to combat spam. The day we installed it, we immediately noticed a significant difference. Since then, it has proven to be one of the best investments we have made in the fight against spam. However, its functionality has expanded beyond spam prevention. It now includes features such as Data Loss Prevention, quarantining of malicious attachments, compliance with workplace policies, and assistance in battling against phishing attempts.

From a security perspective, our organization is much stronger in the email domain. We have effectively monitored spam patterns, and with the rise of phishing in recent years, our capabilities have further improved. This has been beneficial for our organization since we can identify and prevent specific types of phishing emails. 

We have the ability to customize certain aspects ourselves, which has also aided our organization. Additionally, relying solely on users to make secure decisions regarding phishing emails is not always reliable. Asking non-security personnel to make security-related choices can be risky. Therefore, Cisco Secure Email has been instrumental in relieving users of this responsibility. By implementing specific metrics and criteria, we can intercept and block such emails, allowing the system to handle the workload. Although the process requires some manual intervention on our part, it is acceptable considering our large user base of 9,000 individuals. Cisco Secure Email has played a crucial role in shouldering this burden and has greatly benefited our organization.

The effects of Cisco Talos on our security operations are really good. In the past, there was a philosophy that some security professionals used called defense in depth. It has two dimensions. One is implementing defense at the edge of our network, then progressing further inside the network, all the way to the desktop. We continue to implement security at different points, including the desktop, to ensure comprehensive coverage. Another interpretation of defense in depth is implementing security measures from different vendors. Each vendor has its own strengths, such as better virus scanning or more effective firewalls. By using a mix of vendors, we cover a wider range of potential threats and minimize vulnerabilities. However, I believe this approach is no longer necessary because of tools like Cisco Talos. Talos provides such extensive coverage that it quickly addresses new threats. We no longer need to worry about relying on multiple vendors to catch up. Cisco Talos has been great for our security.

It has significantly saved our IT staff a considerable amount of time. Without it, we would likely be dedicating four times the current amount of time to managing email and spam. Currently, one staff member spends five hours per week on this task. Without Cisco Secure Email, that number would increase to twenty hours per week, equivalent to one hundred hours per month. Thus, I estimate a time saving of around three hundred percent. Additionally, the absence of Cisco Secure Email would result in a three to four hundred percent increase in staffing requirements, as we currently have a team member solely responsible for managing the product on a daily basis. However, the time spent by this individual using the solution is far less than it would be if they were dealing with email issues without the solution. Thus, Cisco Secure Email has had an immense impact.

Cisco Secure Email helps us consolidate some tools. When we installed Cisco Secure Email, we had another email PMDF gateway that had extremely outdated capabilities for blocking things. It was ineffective. Cisco Secure Email surpassed our previous methods by leaps and bounds.

Cisco Secure Email has aided our organization in enhancing its cybersecurity resilience. Without Cisco Secure Email, our cybersecurity posture and resilience would be significantly compromised.

We use it primarily for filtering both internal and external messages, especially within our Office 365 environment. It serves as our main filtering solution.

The most significant enhancement we've gained is in terms of security through the upgrade we received.

We have a number of different types of customers and organizations who need to secure their environment. These range from healthcare professionals to financial organizations to very small organizations. They have a number of security requirements, whether it's just to secure the actual environment where they're working and also to provide additional services, such as VPNs and remote access for their remote workers.

Most of the customers that I work with tend to be on-prem, and a lot of them go with the centralized management system, FMC, purely because it has larger memory and larger hard disk space, and it can hold reports for a much longer period of time. Also, as their network infrastructure scales, FMC can manage more and more of their devices, and they're not having to manage individual devices. It's all centralized for them. 

A lot of our customers use another Cisco product already, so they have confidence in Cisco products. The firewalls they are currently deploying and using have evolved from their older ASA products. They are now moving to the new Firepower Threat Defense, which incorporates many more features and allows them to get the latest ALOFT download and feeds for any security vulnerabilities and they're able to react very quickly to any vulnerabilities that have been highlighted.

Initially, when the firewalls were first marketed and came onto the market, the visibility wasn't very good. But as the software evolved over time, that visibility has increased a lot more, and that is giving customers a lot more competence in the traffic and the traffic flows that they're seeing through the actual devices, so they can better understand the types of applications that they have on their network.

The good thing about the actual firewall itself is that it can integrate with other Cisco products, such as Cisco ISE so that it allows full end-to-end visibility of connectivity. It gives very good visibility. It's that integration with other products, not just what that individual firewall can do itself.

Talos is obviously fundamental to the actual firewall, reporting on vulnerabilities that are happening day to day. And the regular downloads, obviously, give customers confidence that their products are as secure as they can actually be.

I use Cisco Secure Email mainly as a email security gateway, including internal email distribution.

We rely heavily on antivirus protection, email content filtering, and authentication mechanisms to ensure compliance with email security. Regarding phishing attempts, while phishing protection features are crucial, we also emphasize user education as a critical defence. The intelligence services Cisco provides, such as the Cisco Intelligence Center, play a significant role in analyzing and validating threats, including phishing attempts, in our email security practices.