"The filtering is definitely better at catching both spam and malicious messages, and there's a lot of extremely granular ability for setting up rules. You can do it the way you want to. The Microsoft solution tends to be pretty limited in how it allows some of that to be done."
"There is a huge return compared to if we didn't have a gateway appliance, as far as blocking malicious emails."
"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."
"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 is doing its work. It is doing what it was actually designed to do. It has ensured we don't have business email compromises, and it has also ensured that our brand Galaxy is unique all year round."
"It does a great job of preventing spam, malware, and ransomware. I can only go by what people have told me and what I've seen, but I have not seen spam in a year and a half to two years in my own company mailbox. And there are not a lot of catches where it's catching something that should have gotten through, either."
"I love the Advanced Malware Protection feature. It works very well... The appliance has more security such as SDF, DKIM, DMARC, and encryption."
"Cisco Secure Email Cloud Gateway has allowed our users to be able to concentrate on the emails that they do receive. Previously, our users had to deal with nine million additional emails across the organization, which is nearly 1,000 emails per user to have to deal with a month. That's a massive amount for our staff to deal with and probably several hours of their time. We have a lot of clinical staff, being a hospital. We want to make our staff as productive as possible. By removing a lot of that spam and phishing type emails, this allows them to do their job."
"The most valuable feature of Avanan is its effectiveness. When scanning incoming emails for threats it can in an automated fashion, quarantine suspicious attachments."
"The customizable rules allow you to change aspects."
"If we look at four to five years ago, we had close to six or eight people click a link in an email per month. Now, we are probably down to about five or six clicks a year, if not less."
"The stability is good."
"The area of license renewal should be improved. We normally renew our license every year. There is a feature called smart licensing, and I switched from the legacy mode to the smart licensing mode because of what I thought smart licensing does. I thought it would make licensing renewal seamless and very swift, but ever since I've switched to smart licensing, each time I want to renew my license, it is a whole lot of headache. The process is not smooth, and I had to keep calling Cisco TAC to see how the issue can be resolved. At one point, I wanted to revert back to the legacy mode, but I can't revert. Once you switch from the legacy mode to the smart licensing mode, you can't revert. They should improve on the visibility of the smart licensing mode so that it can indeed be smart and easier to use for the license renewal every year. That is one challenge."
"The interface is dated. It has looked pretty much the same for 15 years or so. It would be helpful to be able to do everything from one spot. The centralized quarantine and reporting are completely separate from policy administration."
"We have Microsoft and we have the E5 licenses, they have more EDR responses on certain emails. That's something that Cisco ESA on the cloud doesn't have. They don't do anything about MITRE attacks. They only detect if there is a malicious email or a threat and they remove it."
"The configuration UI should be made more intuitive. Currently, it takes a while to understand how to do the basic configurations."
"I would like more functionality and how to use it for Level 2 type staff. The biggest issue is it needs to be easier to use and navigate."
"They can do it better with web links, with the URLs. They have a technology called Outbreak but it doesn't work as well as we would like."
"We have been struggling in the last month with Cisco encryption and with the S/MIME encryption. I don't know if it is an issue on our side or if these features of the solution are not working very well."
"The UI is definitely one area of improvement because it doesn't match other interfaces and the navigation can be a little clunky."
"There are times when we have false positives."
"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."
"Sometimes it seemed like the allow list wasn't working. I've created many allow list rules however, they still seem to be blocked; the same is true with the blocked list rules."
"The integration with Google Suite needs to be better. it's something they can work on."
Avanan is ranked 12th in Email Security with 3 reviews while IRONSCALES is ranked 19th in Email Security with 1 review. Avanan is rated 10.0, while IRONSCALES is rated 9.0. 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 IRONSCALES writes "Easy to set up with great AI and very good threat-sharing capabilities". Avanan is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Proofpoint Cloud App Security Broker, Barracuda Sentinel, GreatHorn Email Security and SonicWall Email Security, whereas IRONSCALES is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Proofpoint Email Protection, Mimecast Email Security with Targeted Threat Protection, TitanHQ SpamTitan and Barracuda Sentinel.
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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.
