"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."
"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 malicious URL scanning, as well as the anti-malware features, have been really useful for us in our environment."
"There is a huge return compared to if we didn't have a gateway appliance, as far as blocking malicious emails."
"Anti-Spam and Advanced Malware Protection are the most valuable features... and we also have the option to block Zero-day attacks."
"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."
"I love the Advanced Malware Protection feature. It works very well... The appliance has more security such as SDF, DKIM, DMARC, and encryption."
"The client has the option to blacklist or whitelist any email address or domain based on the sender and recipient filters. If they want, they can restrict any IP addresses so email won't be received from those IP addresses."
"The product safeguards user mail for gateway defense, data protection, business continuity, AI-based inbox defense, and automated threat detection and incident response."
"We find the email security to be valuable."
"The most valuable feature is the Antispam services, which are the basic services of spam device"
"It is lightweight, and we can filter all of our inbound and outbound emails. We have controls for rate control, quarantine, and tagging. We can see whether an email is a spam email or a phishing email."
"This product is powerful and quite simple to use."
"Eliminating inbox clutter creates an opportunity to be more productive instead of wasting time manually sorting through spam."
"The most important features of Barracuda Email Security Gateway are the simple and quick configuration, interactive console, and easy-to-understand logs."
"I like that it's simple and easy to configure, deploy, and manage. The reporting function has all the features we're looking for, and we are fine with that."
"The setup is pretty simple."
"It is a solid and stable product."
"It has very good capabilities for managing malware."
"Messaging Gateway is stable."
"The solution is stable and the performance is good."
"The most valuable features of Symantec Messaging Gateway are advanced content filtering, malware, and antivirus defense."
"Symantec Messaging Gateway is stable and scalable. Installation is easy, and the deployment and maintenance can be done by one administrative person."
"The configuration UI should be made more intuitive. Currently, it takes a while to understand how to do the basic configurations."
"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 Forged Email Detection feature needs improvement, particularly with domain. The sensors are not that good and the rules sets are unclear."
"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."
"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."
"The UI is definitely one area of improvement because it doesn't match other interfaces and the navigation can be a little clunky."
"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."
"I use the search all the time. Sometimes, it is hard to search for things and things are hard to find. People come to me all the time, saying, "This email didn't get through." Then, I go searching and don't find it on the first search. You have to think about alternative searches. I don't know if there is an easier way that they could help to find things. I don't know how they could simplify it, because now everybody else is using the cloud and everything is coming from Office 365, or whatever. It is just not the same environment from years ago where everybody had their own server and you could search easier."
"The deep scanning feature needs to be improved."
"The solution could improve by adding DomainKeys (DKIM) functionality. This is something that is essentially required nowadays for outbound security. They do not have it on their on-premise solution appliance but they have alternate arrangements for their cloud solution."
"Barracuda should add an option where it can add multiple domains, such as abc.com, bbc.com, and cbc.com. Therefore, this domains' emails will be allowed and other domains' emails will not be relayed through Barracuda Email Security Gateway. Whereas, if you allow the IP address, then any of the domain's emails will be relayed through Barracuda Email Security Gateway. That is the drawback that I have observed. So, Barracuda should work on this."
"I would like to have better integration with third-party archival vendors to facilitate moving data in and out."
"The spam filtering is a little too aggressive. You can not get granular enough to back off on what is considered spam and what is not."
"Barracuda Email Security Gateway can improve email detection. We have some emails that are bypassing the threat scanning. There are some impersonation emails passing through."
"Barracuda has shown difficulty in providing us with the solutions we sought."
"Its integration with other solutions can be improved. There should be integration for telemetry information, system information, and other types of information with other solutions. Barracuda currently doesn't have that. Barracuda has its own platform. Its integration with firewalls is quite good, and it communicates really well with firewalls, but I have not seen any other integration. Based on what I know, it does have an API at the backend, but I have not used it."
"Symantec Messaging Gateway can improve detection because most of them are false negatives or false positives that we are trying to troubleshoot. Additionally, we are having routing problems and they are somehow connected to DNS issues."
"Sometimes the solution picks up false positive for viruses during scans."
"They really need to create a good package that competes with Microsoft."
"The biggest problem is it's an on-prem product and we're trying to get out of having equipment in data centers."
"In a later release, it would be nice if the messaging gateway supported the cluster feature."
"What's lacking when you compare it with Proofpoint and other threat protection solutions is that it does the basic stuff, but we need more advanced threat handling."
"It is a nice product but is not user friendly in terms of the graphical interface. It is poor and is not rich in terms of the human interface."
"Messaging Gateway's advanced malware detection could be improved."
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Barracuda Email Security Gateway is ranked 7th in Email Security with 19 reviews while Symantec Messaging Gateway is ranked 12th in Email Security with 8 reviews. Barracuda Email Security Gateway is rated 7.8, while Symantec Messaging Gateway is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Barracuda Email Security Gateway writes "Instantly blocked and reduced our spam emails ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Symantec Messaging Gateway writes "Easy to set up with good patching and reliable performance". Barracuda Email Security Gateway is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Fortinet FortiMail, Trend Micro Email Security, Check Point Anti-Spam and Email Security Software Blade and Kaspersky Security for Mail Server, whereas Symantec Messaging Gateway is most compared with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Fortinet FortiMail, Proofpoint Email Protection and Forcepoint Email Security. See our Barracuda Email Security Gateway vs. Symantec Messaging Gateway report.
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