We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Office 365 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."There is a huge return compared to if we didn't have a gateway appliance, as far as blocking malicious emails."
"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."
"Cisco Secure Email Cloud Gateway has allowed our users to be able to concentrate on the emails that they do receive. Previously, our users had to deal with nine million additional emails across the organization, which is nearly 1,000 emails per user to have to deal with a month. That's a massive amount for our staff to deal with and probably several hours of their time. We have a lot of clinical staff, being a hospital. We want to make our staff as productive as possible. By removing a lot of that spam and phishing type emails, this allows them to do their job."
"The malicious URL scanning, as well as the anti-malware features, have been really useful for us in our environment."
"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."
"Anti-Spam and Advanced Malware Protection are the most valuable features... and we also have the option to block Zero-day attacks."
"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 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 good part is that you don't have to configure it, which is very convenient."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is the ease of use."
"The basic features are okay and I'm satisfied with the Defender."
"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."
"At the moment we are satisfied with this product. It's a stable, scalable, and resilient solution for us."
"The solution is very easy to use. All you have to do is to assign the license to the end-user and it's done. The customer will only have the feature activated, and the solution will monitor the emails to determine if they are a threat or not."
"Does a thorough job of examining email and URLs for malicious content."
"Safe attachments, safe links, policies, and the ability to protect from zero-day threats are the most valuable features."
"Symantec Messaging Gateway is stable and scalable. Installation is easy, and the deployment and maintenance can be done by one administrative person."
"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."
"It has very good capabilities for managing malware."
"The most valuable features of Symantec Messaging Gateway are advanced content filtering, malware, and antivirus defense."
"The solution is stable and the performance is good."
"Messaging Gateway is stable."
"What I like most about Symantec Messaging Gateway is its usability. I also find its interface very friendly. The solution has a very good interface."
"It is a solid and stable product."
"The interface is dated. It has looked pretty much the same for 15 years or so. It would be helpful to be able to do everything from one spot. The centralized quarantine and reporting are completely separate from policy administration."
"The Forged Email Detection feature needs improvement, particularly with domain. The sensors are not that good and the rules sets are unclear."
"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."
"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."
"The configuration UI should be made more intuitive. Currently, it takes a while to understand how to do the basic configurations."
"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."
"There needs to be an improvement in integrating the product to work across multiple operating systems, and to have better support for non-Microsoft file types."
"The company should focus on adding threats that the solution is currently unable to detect."
"In some situations, it has not been able to pick impersonated emails having no attachments. Technical support definitely has a scope for improvement."
"This product's effectiveness could be improved, in terms of detecting unwanted spam or even malware between the emails, compared to other products."
"There is room for improvement with the UI."
"In one of the reports I can get the exact place where a vulnerable file resides. But for that, I need to explicitly go into the device and check. If they could include that file part in the report, without my having to go to the device itself, that would help."
"We need a separate license and we don't know how to get the license that is required."
"It would be better if it were more scalable. It depends on the architecture, but we would like to make it more scalable for both data centers."
"Messaging Gateway's advanced malware detection could be improved."
"Sometimes the solution picks up false positive for viruses during scans."
"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."
"The biggest problem is it's an on-prem product and we're trying to get out of having equipment in data centers."
"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."
"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."
"What needs to be improved in Symantec Messaging Gateway is its local partner support, as it's not as technical. The support my company gets from the partner isn't good. Vendor support is good, but local partner support isn't. I'm happy with Symantec Messaging Gateway as a solution, but the problem is with its partner support. To me, Symantec Messaging Gateway is a complete solution, but it can be very difficult to search the web for resolutions to issues or problems you experience from it. If this could be improved or resolved in the next release of Symantec Messaging Gateway, then that would be good."
"They really need to create a good package that competes with Microsoft."
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Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is ranked 1st in Email Security with 15 reviews while Symantec Messaging Gateway is ranked 17th in Email Security with 8 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is rated 8.0, while Symantec Messaging Gateway is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 writes "Essential security capabilities, plenty of email protection, and enhanced data loss prevention". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Symantec Messaging Gateway writes "Easy to set up with good patching and reliable performance". Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is most compared with Proofpoint Email Protection, Mimecast Email Security with Targeted Threat Protection, Barracuda Email Security Gateway, Fortinet FortiMail and Sophos Email, whereas Symantec Messaging Gateway is most compared with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection, Fortinet FortiMail, Proofpoint Email Protection, Barracuda Email Security Gateway and Trend Micro Email Security. See our Microsoft Defender for Office 365 vs. Symantec Messaging Gateway report.
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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.
