We performed a comparison between Avanan and Perception Point Advanced Email Security 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."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 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."
"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."
"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 integration with all our existing and new applications is great."
"The threat detection tools enable us to ascertain malware and phishing messages across the email network infrastructure."
"Email Attachment Protection detects any insecure files and quickly blocks them to prevent the spread of viruses to other secure documents."
"It is simple to deploy this platform and interact with the set features."
"When we don't understand some functionalities, the customer support staff responds fast to our calls and provides immediate action."
"It can detect corrupted files and filters out documents with viruses."
"It can retract unsafe emails and remove them from the entire communication channel."
"The customizable rules allow you to change aspects."
"It really works well on SharePoint when you upload a file or save a file. Advanced Email Security scans if it is malicious and identifies issues. It can do some forensics on its console, which is nice."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the ones that are related to finding impersonation attacks and detecting attempts to steal credentials. In scenarios where attackers get you to follow URLs to a malicious site that looks similar to a good site, and then ask for the user credentials to try to steal them, it is very useful."
"We can use it to perform detection and analysis of emails. For any malicious content found in emails, it gives in-depth analysis reports to end users. If you log into the console, you can see in-depth detection and how it happens."
"The most valuable feature of Perception Point Advanced Email Security is the filtering and securing of emails."
"One of the most valuable features is the service provided by the incident response team. There have been cases where we have suspected that emails were fraudulent or something was suspicious. In those cases, we immediately contacted the incident response team through the platform, and we had a response in less than a minute."
"The Perception Point Incident Response team acts as an extension of our SOC team. This is very important for us. This is a benefit provided for their main product of scanning our emails. If Perception Point can give me IR, this is really good versus other products that do not provide this kind of service. Perception Point's service is great. They are very professional. That reduces the time that my internal SOC has to deal with my internal IT person. They just send an email to the IR team at Perception Point, who continues the investigation and blocks any emails, if necessary. This is very good because it can reduce a lot of time and effort from my team. It is like an extension of my SOC, but external."
"I see from time to time that Perception Point is being proactive. They approach us, and say, "Can you check this, and this?" So, it does seem that they are an extension of my incident response."
"Another feature that we really like, one that was introduced a few months back, is the way it categorizes threats into groups, such as Emotet, Qbot, Formbook, and the like. It's not only telling you that something is malware, but it's also giving you insight into what kind of malware... You understand what you are facing and whether you are a target for a specific group of threats..."
"The UI is definitely one area of improvement because it doesn't match other interfaces and the navigation can be a little clunky."
"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."
"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 Forged Email Detection feature needs improvement, particularly with domain. The sensors are not that good and the rules sets are unclear."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It should reduce the amount of time needed for thorough scanning."
"Familiarization with performance for new teams may take a long time."
"The cost can be reviewed to enable SMEs to acquire it and enjoy great security features."
"The customer service team could come up with clear tutorials on how to use this platform to help new teams."
"There are times when we have false positives."
"When sending bulky emails, the system slows down and takes a long time before it responds effectively to our requests."
"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 unified dashboard that it displays needs some improvements in terms of the KPIs that they have."
"There is still room for improvement with BEC. There is more work to be done by Perception Point on machine learning and neuro language as well. BEC is very difficult if you don't have a computer language looking into the content of the email and trying to make a determination through that. With BEC you often don't have an attachment or a URL."
"They could improve their anti-spam engine a little bit, because there are a lot of false positives. Sometimes, emails pass through their system but are spam. In terms of security and engines for malicious emails and antivirus, they're doing a good job. Their other engines can be improved."
"They can do better on the spam. Today, Perception Point is not our only solution. We have two solutions, and they are the second in line because the spam filtering is not yet the best."
"They just don't do a good job of promoting themselves. They seem like a typical busy IT company who is just working on fixing problems and making technology better. However, they are not fantastic at marketing themselves to existing partners, which is not a bad thing. It is just something for improvement."
"I think the interface could be improved in the next release."
"We have had a few false positives, not that many, but a few... they have a feature where someone from the Incident Response team can look at an email and mark it as 'verified malicious.' You might think that if an engine detects it is malicious, and an IR team member has flagged it as malicious, it will definitely be malicious. But that's not always the case."
"From a forensics point of view, it could improve a bit more from a threat intelligence aspect. So, if I find a malicious email, they could have more investigations about sources, headers, where it comes from, if they have seen it in other campaigns before, etc. I would like a little bit more from a threat intelligence point of view so I can understand who else might be affected and attacked as well as the vectors of attack."
"In terms of architecture, and I know that they're going to improve this, the solution needs to be much more redundant. There was an outage a month ago in AWS, and that basically stopped the service for two or three hours. Although in two years, this was the first time that something like that happened, our expectation from a company like Perception Point is that it should work with either a multi-cloud or multi-region architecture, to improve the resilience."
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Avanan is ranked 5th in Email Security with 17 reviews while Perception Point Advanced Email Security is ranked 7th in Email Security with 15 reviews. Avanan is rated 9.4, while Perception Point Advanced Email Security is rated 8.8. 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 Perception Point Advanced Email Security writes "Catches emails that others don't, and we can escalate messages to the Incident Response team for additional expertise". Avanan is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Abnormal Security, IRONSCALES, Mimecast Email Security with Targeted Threat Protection and Fortinet FortiMail, whereas Perception Point Advanced Email Security is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Proofpoint Email Protection, IRONSCALES, Sophos Email and FireEye Email Security. See our Avanan vs. Perception Point Advanced Email Security 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.
