

Cisco Secure Email and Barracuda Email Protection compete in the email security category. While Cisco excels with robust security for larger enterprises, Barracuda appeals to smaller businesses with cost-effective solutions and ease of use.
Features: Cisco Secure Email integrates smoothly with existing networks, offering advanced threat protection, filtering capabilities, and policy customizations to block spam, viruses, and malware. On the other hand, Barracuda Email Protection is known for its ease of use and strong integration with Microsoft 365, providing essential protection features at an affordable rate for smaller setups.
Room for Improvement: Cisco Secure Email would benefit from improving its management interfaces and cloud service integrations to address ease-of-use concerns, particularly for smaller organizations. Conversely, Barracuda needs to enhance its reporting functionalities and expand integration options beyond Microsoft 365 while strengthening fraud detection capabilities.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco offers on-premises and hybrid cloud deployment, providing flexibility based on needs, although initial setup can be complex. Its customer service is well-regarded. Barracuda focuses on public cloud deployment, which is simpler and favored by less technical users, though some experience inconsistency in support.
Pricing and ROI: Cisco Secure Email involves higher costs, justified by extensive security features, providing a positive ROI by preventing costly breaches. Barracuda's pricing strategy is budget-friendly, appealing to smaller businesses by offering core protection at a lower total cost of ownership.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Cisco Secure Email | 5.5% |
| Barracuda Email Protection | 3.0% |
| Other | 91.5% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 12 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 5 |
| Large Enterprise | 3 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 22 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 18 |
| Large Enterprise | 25 |
The popularity of Microsoft 365 means criminals test and design their attacks to bypass its native security features. And that means you need additional layers of defense. With Advanced Threat Protection enabled, Barracuda uses multiple layers of detection, including signature, static, and behavioral analysis, along with CPU-emulation sandboxing to accurately detect and block zero-hour targeted attacks and ransomware.
Traditional email gateways use static rules and policies—reputation analysis, block lists, and malicious payloads—to determine if an email is malicious.
Barracuda protects your Microsoft 365 inbox against evasive threats with a powerful AI engine that learns the unique communication patterns within your organization through access to internal and historical emails. Once it understands what legitimate emails looks like for each user, it can detect anomalies that signal malicious intent. This context-based detection is more effective at blocking targeted attacks, which are designed to bypass traditional rule-based email security.
Cisco Secure Email provides email security with advanced threat protection, spam filtering, and easy integration with Cisco Talos, ensuring comprehensive protection against cyber threats like phishing and malware.
Cisco Secure Email offers a comprehensive platform for organizations seeking robust email security. With advanced threat protection and seamless integration with Cisco Talos, it enhances threat intelligence. The tool provides easy-to-use spam blocking and granular policy customization. Effective ransomware, phishing, and malware protection ensures stable network performance. It includes logging and reporting features, along with Active Directory integration, delivering enhanced security without extra hardware. Although it addresses threats efficiently, improvements in synchronization with reporting tools and phishing detection are needed. Organizations find cost and licensing complexities challenging for smaller networks and seek more intuitive configuration, advanced AI threat detection, and comprehensive reporting. Enhanced support, documentation, and cross-platform compatibility are desirable for better management and scalability.
What are the most important features?In industries like finance, healthcare, and IT, Cisco Secure Email is key to securing email communications. It serves as the primary email gateway in datacenters, scanning and filtering emails to defend against phishing, malware, and spam. Many organizations integrate it with Sophos Antivirus and Talos Threat Intelligence for heightened protection. It plays a crucial role in outbound message control and data loss prevention, ensuring compliance with security policies.
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