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Cisco Secure Endpoint vs Sophos SafeGuard comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Secure Endpoint
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (12th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (13th), Cisco Security Portfolio (5th)
Sophos SafeGuard
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Encryption (2nd), Mobile Data Protection (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Endpoint Security solutions, they serve different purposes. Cisco Secure Endpoint is designed for Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) and holds a mindshare of 1.5%, down 1.8% compared to last year.
Sophos SafeGuard, on the other hand, focuses on Endpoint Encryption, holds 2.3% mindshare, down 3.6% since last year.
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
Endpoint Encryption
 

Featured Reviews

Mark Broughton - PeerSpot reviewer
Tighter integration with Umbrella and Firepower gave us eye-opening information
We were using a third-party help desk. One of the ways that they were fixing problems was to delete the client and then add the client back if there was an issue where the client had stopped communicating. Any improvement in the client communicating back to the server would be good, particularly for machines that are offline for a couple of weeks. A lot of our guys were working on a rotation where the machine might be offline for that long. They were also terrible about rebooting their machines, so those network connections didn't necessarily get refreshed. So, anything that could improve that communication would be good. Also, an easier way to do deduplication of machines, or be alerted to the fact that there's more than one instance of a machine, would be useful. If you could say, "Okay, we've got these two machines. This one says it's not reporting and this one says it's been reporting. Obviously, somebody did a reinstall," it would help. That way you could get a more accurate device count, so you're not having an inflated number. Not that Cisco was going to come down on you and say, "Oh, you're using too many licenses," right away. But to have a much more accurate license usage count by being able to better dedupe the records would be good. I also sent over a couple of other ideas to our technical rep. A lot of that had to do with the reporting options. It would be really nice to be able to do a lot more in the reporting. You can't really drill down into the reports that are there. The reporting and the need for the documentation to be updated and current would be my two biggest areas of complaint. Also, there was one section when I was playing with the automation where it was asking for the endpoint type rather than the machine name. If I could have just put in the machine name, that would have been great. So there are some opportunities, when it comes to searching, to have more options. If I wanted to search, for example, by a Mac address because, for some reason, I thought there was a duplication and I didn't have the machine name, how could I pull it up with the Mac address? When you're getting to that level, you're really starting to get into the ticky tacky. I would definitely put the reporting and documentation way ahead of that.
ManelAlvarez - PeerSpot reviewer
Protects user data and offers data control and has an easy deployment
The most valuable feature is encryption control. If you have a laptop, it guarantees that the data is not missing or lost. It’s easy to deploy and has a central console where you can see whether the laptops are encrypted, updated, and protected. It protects devices, including USB and other external devices, and guarantees data loss protection. Additionally, with device control, you can ensure that no ransomware is introduced into the network. For me, this is of very high value.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Its most valuable features are its scalability and advanced threat protection for customers."
"Cisco has definitely improved our organization a lot. In terms of business, our company feels safer. We actually switched from legacy signature-based solutions to threat intelligence-based and machine learning-based solutions, which is Cisco Secure. This has improved our security significantly, from 10% of signature-based technology security to 99.9% of the current one which we are running. We were happy."
"The best feature that we found most valuable, is actually the security product for the endpoint, formerly known as AMP. It has behavioral analytics, so you can be more proactive toward zero-day threats. I found that quite good."
"Another of my favorite features is called the Device Trajectory, where it shows everything that's going on, on a computer. It shows the point in time when a virus is downloaded, so you can see if the user was surfing the internet or had a program open. It shows every running process and file access on the computer and saves it like a snapshot when it detects something malicious. It also has a File Trajectory, so you can even see if that file has been found on any of your other computers that have AMP."
"It is a very stable program."
"It's quite simple, and the advantage I see is that I get the trajectory of what happened inside the network, how a file has been transmitted to the workstation, and which files have got corrupted."
"The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is that there is a lot more malware slipping through my email filters than I expected."
"appreciate the File Trajectory feature, as it's excellent for an analyst or mobile analyst. I can track everything that happens on our server from my PC or device. Integration with SecureX is a welcome feature because it connects Cisco's integrated security portfolio with our complete infrastructure. Sandboxing is helpful, and integration with the Cisco environment is excellent as we use many of their products, and that's very valuable for us."
"The malware protection and the scanning features are most valuable in this solution."
"It's easy to use. You have to pay extra for additional, but the basic product is fantastic. It will be a good solution for you, depending on your requirements."
"The most valuable feature is encryption control. If you have a laptop, it guarantees that the data is not missing or lost."
"What I love most about Sophos SafeGuard is its user-friendly interface. My company has another software with a complex user interface versus Sophos SafeGuard, which is extremely easy to use."
"The solution can block a virus attack and prevent it from moving across the system."
"Security-wise, it's one of the best."
"I like its ease of use the most. The management console is really nice. I like having one pane of glass that does everything. It does the Sophos anti-virus and encryption. Everything that you need is in one place. It is easy to use, and it is also pretty fast. It provides some pretty good details, and it lets you know who has access to a file. You can also add additional people to the encrypted documents, which is pretty good. Its stability and performance are also very good."
"The monitoring features are easy to use."
 

Cons

"The solution needs more in-depth analytics."
"We had a lot of noise at the beginning, and we had to turn it down based on exclusions, application whitelisting, and excluding unknown benign applications. Cisco should understand the need for continuous updates on the custom Cisco exclusions and the custom applications that come out-of-the-box with the AMP for Endpoints."
"We have had some problems with updates not playing nice with our environment. This is important, because if there is a new version, we need to test it thoroughly before it goes into production. We cannot just say, "There's a new version. It's not going to give us any problems." With the complexity of the solution using multiple engines for multiple tasks, it can sometimes cause performance issues on our endpoints. Therefore, we need to test it before we deploy. That takes one to three days before we can be certain that the new version plays nice with our environment."
"The one challenge that I see is the use of multiple endpoint protection platforms. For instance, we have AMP, but we also have Microsoft Windows Defender, System Center Endpoint Protection, and Microsoft Malware Protection Engine deployed. So, we have a bunch of different things that do the same thing. What winds up happening is, e.g., if I get an alert for a potential incident or malware and want to pull the file, I'll go to fetch the file to analyze it. But, one of these other programs has already gotten it, so the file has already been quarantined by another endpoint protection system. AMP doesn't realize that and the file fetch fails, then you're left wondering what's going on."
"The room for improvement would be on event notifications. I have mine tuned fairly well. I do feel that if you subscribe to all the event notification types out-of-the-box, or don't really go through and take the time to filter out events, the notifications can become overwhelming with information. Sometimes, when you're overwhelmed with information, you just say, "I'm not going to look at anything because I'm receiving so much." I recommend the vendor come up with a white paper on the best practices for event notifications."
"Cisco Meraki could benefit from AI assistance or intelligent assistance features. Compared to competitors like Juniper, Cisco Meraki currently lacks a digital network assistant, which is an area Cisco is reportedly working on."
"Maybe there is room for improvement in some of the automated remediation. We have other tools in place that AMP feeds into that allow for that to happen, so I look at it as one seamless solution. But if you're buying AMP all by itself, I don't know if it can remove malicious software after the fact or if it requires the other tools that we use to do some of that."
"Previously, there were options to uninstall the agent without a password if you had admin access, and this could be improved."
"An area for improvement in Sophos SafeGuard is the pricing. Pricing should be better when adding a new account or scaling the product."
"In the next release, I would like to see more automation with the endpoint logging, but it's a special feature that is quite complicated to explain."
"Sophos SafeGuard is a German product. Sophos isn't really active in Europe. The Middle East, Africa, South Africa works with Sophos but their primary users aren't in Europe. They should market and push this solution to the European market."
"Technical support could be a bit better."
"Sometimes, multiple updates and crashes happen in the tool, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The cost is rather expensive. It's a pain point for many clients. They should work to see if they can reduce pricing."
"If it's possible, they should make all the features available because it's got a lot of features on offer, but you have to buy the license in order to add those features to the normal Endpoint. If they could make all those features available and/or offer a bundling option it would be better."
"Once you lock a server, you won't be able to install or put something on that particular server, but on the PC or machines, the lockdown feature is not there, and it is a query our company raised when we had to provide details for Sophos' review."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You must make monthly payments towards the licensing charges attached to the product. There are no extra charges apart from the standard licensing fees associated with the product."
"Cisco's pricing is reasonable. We also do not need to opt for niche players, which would have charged us significantly more than Cisco for ecosystem solutions. We are highly satisfied with the pricing structure of Cisco's solutions they are reasonable."
"There is also the Cisco annual subscription plus my management time in terms of what I do with the Cisco product. I spend a minimal amount of time on it though, just rolling out updates as they need them and monitoring the console a couple of times a day to ensure nothing is out of control. Cost-wise, we are quite happy with it."
"It can always be cheaper."
"The pricing and licensing are reasonable. The cost of AMP for Endpoints is inline with all the other software that has a monthly endpoint cost. It might be a little bit higher than other antivirus type products, but we're only talking about a dollar a month per user. I don't see that cost as being an issue if it's going to give us the confidence and security that we're looking for. We have had a lot of success and happiness with what we're using, so there's no point in changing."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The price is very good."
"Whenever you are doing the licensing process, I would highly advise to look at what other Cisco solutions you have in your organization, then evaluate if an Enterprise Agreement is the best way to go. In our case, it was the best way to go. Since we had so many other Cisco products, we were able to tie those in. We were actually able to get several Cisco security solutions for less than if we had bought three or four Cisco security solutions independently or ad hoc."
"Regarding pricing, it's a middle-priced solution. We typically use Sophos SafeGuard with the Sophos firewall, which includes VPN connections. The cost depends on the number of users, with some customers requiring hundreds of connections and others needing around a thousand."
"It's a software license with a one-time purchase. There are no issues with purchasing, and the vendor is flexible with licensing."
"The platform is reasonably priced considering its functionality and adaptability. It is subscription-based."
"I rate the pricing two or three on a scale of one to ten, where one is expensive, and ten is cheap."
"I rate the product price a six on a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."
"Licensing is on a yearly basis and the pricing could be better."
"The pricing is good and now they offer three year and five year plans. After that if one lokes the service they can choose the lifetime service."
"It would be great if the price of the solution was lower than the current price. If we are to sell this particular solution to smaller businesses and not just enterprise businesses it needs to be lower."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Healthcare Company
11%
Real Estate/Law Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco Secure Endpoint?
The product's initial setup phase was very simple.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Endpoint?
Cisco is aggressive in pricing, making it competitive and sometimes even cheaper than other good products like CrowdStrike, Microsoft Defender, or SentinelOne.
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Endpoint?
Cisco Secure Endpoint lacks features like DLP which other vendors offer. XDR is new, so integration capabilities with third-party tools need improvement. The forensic capabilities need enhancement,...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sophos SafeGuard?
I cannot compare prices precisely, so I would give it a five out of ten rating. I am uncertain. Sophos is slightly more expensive than some other vendors. A bundle might be an option for cost-consc...
What needs improvement with Sophos SafeGuard?
I cannot think of any improvements right now.
 

Also Known As

Cisco AMP for Endpoints
SafeGuard, SafeGuard Encryption
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Heritage Bank, Mobile County Schools, NHL University, Thunder Bay Regional, Yokogawa Electric, Sam Houston State University, First Financial Bank
Rushmoor Borough Council
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