"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."
"There is a huge return compared to if we didn't have a gateway appliance, as far as blocking malicious emails."
"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."
"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."
"It does a great job of preventing spam, malware, and ransomware. I can only go by what people have told me and what I've seen, but I have not seen spam in a year and a half to two years in my own company mailbox. And there are not a lot of catches where it's catching something that should have gotten through, either."
"The malicious URL scanning, as well as the anti-malware features, have been really useful for us in our environment."
"It has the ability to tell us, after an email has been delivered, where else it went, once it got inside. Maybe it's something we wanted it to stop and it didn't stop it, but it notified us later that it was something that it should have stopped. It can give us a trajectory of all the other places that it went internally and it can tell us what files were transferred as well."
"I love the Advanced Malware Protection feature. It works very well... The appliance has more security such as SDF, DKIM, DMARC, and encryption."
"The GUI is quite nice."
"Once deployed, the management console is simple and easy to use."
"I have found the web content filtering and malware filter the most valuable."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to allow or block sites by category."
"The Forcepoint client software can be downloaded on a user's machine so that it can filter the sites from home or the office. That's one of the biggest features. We can use it for filtering our laptops for our users at any place."
"The critical role is web URL filtering."
"In terms of performance, Forcepoint stands out because it is more scalable than any other solution. It can extend to different types of boxes and integrate well with other platforms and vendors. And it doesn't need to have the same kind of box or throughput to have high availability."
"The feature that I find to be most valuable is the flexibility of the single endpoint."
"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."
"Typically, in a phishing email, they try to use a name everybody's going to recognize, like the CEO's name or the CFO's name... With this appliance, the way it's designed at the moment, for us to really stop that with any level of confidence, we have to build a dictionary of all the names of the people we want it to check, and all the ways they could be spelled. My name would be in there as Phillip Collins, Phillip D. Collins, Phillip Dean Collins, Phil Collins, Phil D. Collins. There could be eight or 10 variations of my name that we'd have to put in the dictionary. There's no artificial intelligence to say "Phil Collins" could be all these other things, and to stop phishing from coming through in that way."
"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."
"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."
"The configuration UI should be made more intuitive. Currently, it takes a while to understand how to do the basic configurations."
"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 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."
"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."
"It's the support that's the problem because that's a different question from the product itself — it's the Achilles heel."
"I have been in contact with technical support several times, and I am not happy with them."
"Overall the software is occupying too much memory space. If they could remedy that, it would be a better experience, because today Windows is occupying too much memory space as well (in terms of the RAM), and this software has also started occupying all the memory. Due to this, I have less space for my other office products and data. I can't, for example, operate a huge Excel sheet or other datasets."
"There should be more hardware models available and the application control could improve."
"To access the root of the product for troubleshooting you must have a data engineer. This is the big issue with Forcepoint. The support community is not good."
"It has a problem with tablets and the iPhone. It's not filtering on these platforms. It filters on Windows but not iOS or Android."
"We are using a V10000 G3 appliance. It is just a proxy. It is just HTTP, FTP, and HTTPS. Now, as our website has developed and we are using rich time-connectivity protocols, the proxy doesn't have the ability to work with these protocols. It would be nice if the UDP feature was there for it to filter UDP traffic. It needs firewall capabilities for UDP filtering. Its upgrades can be quite complex, and they don't always go as per the plan. Its reporting could be a bit more granular."
"In the on-premises version, I don't like the deployment and structuring of the device."
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Cisco Secure Email is ranked 1st in Email Security with 11 reviews while Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is ranked 3rd in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 16 reviews. Cisco Secure Email is rated 9.0, while Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Email writes "Stops the vast majority of email from getting in, across our multiple email domains". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway writes "Flexible endpoint security, provides URL filtering, and the reporting is good". Cisco Secure Email is most compared with FireEye Email Security, Proofpoint Email Protection, Fortinet FortiMail, Cisco Secure Email Cloud Mailbox and Barracuda Email Security Gateway, whereas Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is most compared with Cisco Umbrella, Zscaler Internet Access, Fortinet FortiProxy, Netskope CASB and Prisma SaaS by Palo Alto Networks.
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.
