We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense and Symantec Messaging Gateway 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."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."
"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 most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is the ease of use."
"The initial setup is straightforward. You just add the license, click it, and then you can set up the rules. It is quite simple."
"I would say that 90% of the spam and phishing attack emails get blocked right off the bat."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a stable solution."
"It gives us visibility into threats and, for endpoints, it helps us to prioritize threats. We used to have a lack of visibility, but now our time to detect and respond has decreased."
"I would say it's very comprehensive, with multiple antivirus OEMs, virus encrypt features, encryption, and more."
"The features and functionalities are much better than Microsoft's in-built Defender plan."
"It's very easy to deploy and configure."
"Cisco has a threat mechanism called cloud-based Talos, where all the threats are inbuilt."
"The ability to see east-west traffic is its most valuable feature. Traditionally, email defense focuses on north-south, inbound-outbound, egress-ingress traffic. With Cisco Secure Email Cloud Mailbox, it's able to quickly identify, track, tag, and categorize emails that are internal. That can typically give us visibility into if there's an internal compromised account (for example). Someone can then use that internal compromised account to email additional accounts with either malicious software or links, but internal within that Office tenant. Effectively, that email message never leaves the tenant. Any of the mail gateways really do not have any method or way of seeing this traffic since it's not leaving the environment."
"It has an efficient email filtering feature."
"Cisco Secure Email Cloud Mailbox can handle a complete portfolio, which is required to protect any kind of attack coming from emails. However, it does not have advanced phishing, but it is available through Cisco. If you compare Cisco Secure Email Cloud Mailbox with the competition, in the competition you have to have one or two solutions together to address the customer's requirement, whereas Cisco Secure Email Cloud Mailbox is addressing everything, such as web domain and email protection. If there is any kind of challenge it will come across through email."
"On ease of use, it rates very high. It's something that I was able to get into without really looking at any documentation. I wanted to see what it felt like before I started looking at any documentation on how to use it, and it was very easy to use. It works very smoothly. The user experience is very intuitive. They did an amazing job on that."
"The feature that I like the best is the fingerprinting concept."
"The setup is pretty simple."
"Symantec’s spyware and malware signature database is very good compared to other products."
"Messaging Gateway is stable."
"The anti-malware and spam features are valuable."
"Symantec is a secure product."
"The solution is "set and forget". You pay for it and everything is done for you."
"The solution is highly customizable. You can make rules for domains and configure policies for spam or malware. Messaging Gateway is an on-prem solution, so it's useful for companies without a cloud presence."
"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."
"Microsoft should provide more documentation for users so they can self-educate. I would like to see more documentation for advanced security features."
"We need a separate license and we don't know how to get the license that is required."
"Microsoft security solutions work as expected. They are constantly updating the solutions to make them better. At the same time, the changes can impact a customer's environment, and we need to adjust settings. Sometimes we aren't aware of the changes, and nothing is pushed from the backend automatically."
"The GUI is sometimes slow to fetch the device report and could be improved."
"About eight months ago, we started to measure the quantity of phishing and spam that we have been receiving, and it has been increasing a lot. That means that protection for our email is not as good as we were expecting."
"They can improve their security in a way where a customer can know if all their attachments are safe or not to open through a report. The solution does its job perfectly, but it never reports to the customer whether those attachments have been stopped before or not."
"There's room for improvement regarding the time frame for retrieving emails."
"We encounter issues while searching for missing emails."
"Customers will benefit greatly from monthly billing because the majority of customers today use the cloud, be it Office 365, or Google Cloud."
"The search area has room for improvement. When you go to the next page, it remains at the bottom of the current page that you're on. Also, under the reports section, it allows you to see any "convictions," but if you want to search for those convictions you have to remember when they all came in and go back and edit the search accordingly. You cannot click on the list of convictions to actually see if you had a spike at a certain time."
"There is still room for improvement in terms of integrations with other Cisco tools and non-Cisco tools. There is also some room for improvement needed in terms of the reporting."
"From a technical point of view, Cisco is far behind in terms of cybersecurity, and it has to improve very much."
"The pricing could always be better."
"The solution is a bit expensive."
"The tool gives false positives and it needs to be more accurate. I would like to see AI as a new feature."
"The documentation could have more detailed examples of how to use the product in various situations. As more companies shift to the cloud, they could better integrate the on-prem and cloud versions through an on-prem client."
"The solution takes up a lot of memory."
"They have updated the version of the Messaging Gateway and the new features they are adding the need to be re-evaluated. They have done some changes on the policy."
"We've had issues in the past where the user finds spam, and Symantec does not recognize it as spam."
"They really need to create a good package that competes with Microsoft."
"This product would benefit from better integration with Symantec Endpoint Protection."
"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."
"In a later release, it would be nice if the messaging gateway supported the cluster feature."
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Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense is ranked 16th in Email Security with 11 reviews while Symantec Messaging Gateway is ranked 6th in Secure Email Gateway (SEG) with 20 reviews. Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense is rated 8.2, while Symantec Messaging Gateway is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense writes "Easy to deploy and configure with excellent support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Symantec Messaging Gateway writes "A stable and reasonably priced solution that performs well and has a very good malware database". Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense is most compared with Cisco Secure Email, Kiteworks, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Abnormal Security and Armorblox, whereas Symantec Messaging Gateway is most compared with Cisco Secure Email, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Fortinet FortiMail, Trend Micro Email Security and Proofpoint Email Protection. See our Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense vs. Symantec Messaging Gateway report.
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