We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Email and Avanan, based on PeerSpot users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Avanan is the preferred product over Cisco Secure Email based on user reviews. Avanan excels in advanced threat detection and prevention, with AI and machine learning continuously improving and updating its library. Avanan also has the best customer service, with professional, helpful, and innovative staff. Both products have positive ROI, but Avanan has an edge in reducing the number of compromised email accounts and phishing attacks, helping protect mobile devices, and providing explicit details on why emails are blocked.
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable features are safe attachments and safe links."
"It also gives the vulnerability status according to the versions you have selected. Let's say you have Google Chrome. It mentions the versions it has, and it updates. Within two hours of an update, it is reflected in the dashboard. That's really nice to have."
"The solution is very easy to use. All you have to do is to assign the license to the end-user and it's done. The customer will only have the feature activated, and the solution will monitor the emails to determine if they are a threat or not."
"Some of the valuable features on the email side are anti-phishing, anti-malware, and Safe Links."
"There are several features that I consider valuable."
"The risk level notifications are most valuable. We get to know what kind of intrusion or attack is there, and we can fix a problem on time."
"The good part is that you don't have to configure it, which is very convenient."
"The product's scalability is good."
"Easy to use for non-technical users."
"The ease of installation and the AI capacity of the product are valuable."
"The program has reduced the dangers related to phishing, malware, ransomware, and other vulnerabilities."
"The most valuable feature of Avanan is its effectiveness. When scanning incoming emails for threats it can in an automated fashion, quarantine suspicious attachments."
"Spam protection is the most valuable feature."
"Email inspection has saved many employees from spam attacks and viruses from unauthorized sources."
"Avanan is a stable software. My company hasn't faced any issues, bugs, or problems with the performance of Avanan."
"When we don't understand some functionalities, the customer support staff responds fast to our calls and provides immediate action."
"We like the in-built features, like the email filtering based on the IP and domain. Cisco has its own blacklisted domains and IPs, which is very good. This filters around 70 percent of emails from spam, and we are seeing fewer false positives with this."
"What I find the most valuable about Cisco Secure Email is that the logs are not that difficult to see even if you're not used to them. The logs are reasonably readable and diagnosing the problem is not too hard with them."
"The most significant enhancement we've gained is in terms of security through the upgrade we received."
"The most valuable features are Advanced Malware Protection, URL filtering, and of course Reputation Filtering."
"The added value of it is that every migration to a new version is initiated by the Cisco version itself, so that is a bunch of work that you don't have to do on the Cisco ESA system on-premise. As it becomes a safe platform, you don't need to invest anything in your own data center or in your upgrade path."
"It has an intuitive, clear graphical interface where you can deploy your policies and understand the overall flow. There are a lot of things that you cannot handle on the graphic interface, like message filters. For this, you need to go to a lower level where you have more power, like command line interface. So, this solution has the best of both worlds. There are not a lot of bells and whistles. It is more practical with access to most features that you can configure."
"The solution is very configurable. It has enabled us to configure some specific filters to stop emails that general configurations didn't stop. It's a powerful solution. It can analyze a lot of emails simultaneously, with no problems of capacity or system load."
"Anti-Spam and Advanced Malware Protection are the most valuable features... and we also have the option to block Zero-day attacks."
"In one of the reports I can get the exact place where a vulnerable file resides. But for that, I need to explicitly go into the device and check. If they could include that file part in the report, without my having to go to the device itself, that would help."
"Microsoft should provide more documentation for users so they can self-educate. I would like to see more documentation for advanced security features."
"They can improve their security in a way where a customer can know if all their attachments are safe or not to open through a report. The solution does its job perfectly, but it never reports to the customer whether those attachments have been stopped before or not."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 could improve by giving customers information on techniques to prevent threats. For example, information about best practices on how to protect their own devices against hackers and scammers, such as educational information or training. This would help others have a better understanding of cyber security. Additionally, there can be more security features added."
"It would be better if it were more scalable. It depends on the architecture, but we would like to make it more scalable for both data centers."
"We need to be able to whitelist data at the backend."
"They have moved features from one console to another. Things have been moved around in the interface and it takes me time to find where certain features are."
"Too many false positives and lacks an accurate capability to detect malicious SharePoint sites."
"There are times when we have false positives."
"It is complicated for new users unfamiliar with the modern cloud networking infrastructure."
"Familiarization with performance for new teams may take a long time."
"It should also offer a quick backup in case any email is wrongly quarantined or deleted to ensure no data loss."
"Being cloud first and because we are in the movie business, we use a lot of Macintoshes. So, there is absolutely no reason for us to have Active Directory whatsoever. However, if you are using Office 365, you must have Active Directory in order to reset passwords. Even though we have a single sign-on provider, we must have Azure Active Directory for Office 365, which is really stupid. As a cloud application, you would think that I don't need Active Directory, which I don't need for anything else except Office 365. We have one server inside that space to help us manage Active Directory just for Office 365. This is a very sore point, but it is what it is."
"The cost can be reviewed to enable SMEs to acquire it and enjoy great security features."
"The user experience must be improved."
"The system response in a slow computing device affects performance when sending and receiving emails."
"There are some concerns in the way the architecture is set up, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The UI is definitely one area of improvement because it doesn't match other interfaces and the navigation can be a little clunky."
"The management features of the product are not up to date."
"They could improve the filters. In my time at the company, there were several times we had to contact support to update the filters."
"Licensing is quite complicated for a number of customers, including ourselves."
"We would like to see more options for the customization of content filters."
"There could be additional DLP functionality for it."
"Typically, in a phishing email, they try to use a name everybody's going to recognize, like the CEO's name or the CFO's name... With this appliance, the way it's designed at the moment, for us to really stop that with any level of confidence, we have to build a dictionary of all the names of the people we want it to check, and all the ways they could be spelled. My name would be in there as Phillip Collins, Phillip D. Collins, Phillip Dean Collins, Phil Collins, Phil D. Collins. There could be eight or 10 variations of my name that we'd have to put in the dictionary. There's no artificial intelligence to say "Phil Collins" could be all these other things, and to stop phishing from coming through in that way."
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Avanan is ranked 6th in Email Security with 21 reviews while Cisco Secure Email is ranked 2nd in Email Security with 55 reviews. Avanan is rated 9.2, while Cisco Secure Email is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Avanan writes "We've noticed a significant decline from people accidentally or intentionally clicking on things". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Secure Email writes "Has effortless spam control, improves security posture, and frees up our IT department's time". Avanan is most compared with Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration, IRONSCALES, Perception Point Advanced Email Security, Abnormal Security and Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), whereas Cisco Secure Email is most compared with Trellix Collaboration Security, Fortinet FortiMail, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Proofpoint Email Protection and Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense. See our Avanan vs. Cisco Secure Email report.
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We monitor all Email Security reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.