We performed a comparison between Avanan and Microsoft Defender for Office 365 based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Email Security solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"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 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."
"I love the Advanced Malware Protection feature. It works very well... The appliance has more security such as SDF, DKIM, DMARC, and encryption."
"It's flexible. There are a lot of rules and policies that can be easily applied for certain employees or certain mailboxes."
"The malicious URL scanning, as well as the anti-malware features, have been really useful for us in our environment."
"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."
"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."
"I highly recommend this solution to any prospective buyer."
"Email Attachment Protection detects any insecure files and quickly blocks them to prevent the spread of viruses to other secure documents."
"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."
"It can detect corrupted files and filters out documents with viruses."
"I like Avanan's SmartDLP module. It's seamless, and the administrative overhead is low. We aren't a very sophisticated operation. We just want to reduce our exposure, so we find ThreatCloud helpful. Avanan's acquisition by Check Point was beneficial for them."
"The most valuable feature of Avanan is its effectiveness. When scanning incoming emails for threats it can in an automated fashion, quarantine suspicious attachments."
"Email encryption enhances end to end security of any data before it passes through the networking system."
"The customizable rules allow you to change aspects."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a stable solution."
"Does a thorough job of examining email and URLs for malicious content."
"At the moment we are satisfied with this product. It's a stable, scalable, and resilient solution for us."
"It also gives me good visibility because, with Defender, I'm using a Microsoft product to defend Microsoft products. The integration was really seamless and I have wide visibility because it picks up almost everything. Literally, I can see almost every activity that happens, from the e-mail to the workstation itself."
"The technical support is good and quick to resolve issues."
"Safe attachments, safe links, policies, and the ability to protect from zero-day threats are the most valuable features."
"Threat Explorer is one of the features that I very much like because it is a real-time report that allows you to identify, analyze, and trace security attacks."
"The most valuable feature is the integration. It's a single console, so we don't have to switch around between multiple products. Another valuable feature is the ease of operations and maintenance."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The UI is definitely one area of improvement because it doesn't match other interfaces and the navigation can be a little clunky."
"My opinion on the licensing of this solution is that it is a mess that needs sorting out. I am not particularly bothered by pricing as I administer it and make recommendations for people to buy or not to buy."
"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."
"If you are not a technical guy, it is hard to maneuver, but as soon as you work on it, it gets better and better. If there was a better way to know how to do things or how to find things, it would be good."
"The Forged Email Detection feature needs improvement, particularly with domain. The sensors are not that good and the rules sets are unclear."
"It should reduce the amount of time needed for thorough scanning."
"They should come up with a mobile application so that it can be more flexible."
"The cost can be reviewed to enable SMEs to acquire it and enjoy great security features."
"The system could be designed to give corporate emails first priority due to demands."
"The unified dashboard that it displays needs some improvements in terms of the KPIs that they have."
"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 system response in a slow computing device affects performance when sending and receiving emails."
"There are times when we have false positives."
"We are always looking for others tools to increase automation on tasks. There can be better integration with other solutions, such as PowerPoint and email."
"I'd like some additional features any product can give me to protect our environment in a better way."
"This product's effectiveness could be improved, in terms of detecting unwanted spam or even malware between the emails, compared to other products."
"Configuration requires going to a lot of places rather than just accessing one tab."
"The custom alerts have to improve a lot."
"In some situations, it has not been able to pick impersonated emails having no attachments. Technical support definitely has a scope for improvement."
"One area for improvement is integration. For example, when it comes to external SaaS platforms, we were not able to get a lot of information on integrations with such apps for security and authentication."
"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."
More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pricing and Cost Advice →
Avanan is ranked 5th in Email Security with 17 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is ranked 1st in Email Security with 19 reviews. Avanan is rated 9.4, while Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is rated 8.0. 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 Microsoft Defender for Office 365 writes "Prioritizes threats across our enterprise and safeguards us from any incoming threats or viruses". Avanan is most compared with Abnormal Security, IRONSCALES, Mimecast Email Security with Targeted Threat Protection, Proofpoint Email Protection and Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection, whereas Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is most compared with Proofpoint Email Protection, Mimecast Email Security with Targeted Threat Protection, Barracuda Email Security Gateway, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection and IRONSCALES. See our Avanan vs. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 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.
