Avanan vs. Barracuda ESG (discontinued)

What it says, it provides. It has the Data leak prevention that is the major help while we have to deal with lot of clients at a time. It has the Secure Click that checks any embedded hyperlink so that when we work on emails we don't have to worry about the hidden security threats inside a email.

Good combination when using their other products like an incident response. When using automated workflows, this makes creating sender policies a breeze. Unfortunately, this can also be done too well as it may filter out valid emails and to resend or place them back into users' mailbox isn't an easy thing to do even if you attempt to resend through the Email Security Gateway.

• The dashboard for Avanan makes all of the most important information easy to digest.
• Alerting - specifically, the Geo-Location alerts allow us to see if a user has possibly been compromised.
• The End-User Email Quarantine experience gives users the ability to request emails be released, which trains them to better spot legitimate emails.

Incentivized

• ESS has a simple interface for both users and administrators.
• The "Manage Quarantine" button in each email is a direct sign-on link, so users don't have to remember their password to manage their quarantine (this is GOLD, Jerry!).
• The baseline functionality (catching spam/malware/phishing/malware attachments/malformed PDFs etc) is super-solid, with few false positives and few false negatives.

Incentivized

• I only ever had one complaint, we had a few hiccups during the setup process. We have now been a customer for two years and have had no further issues. It is likely that the setup pain points have now been resolved as well. Overall the product does what it claims while providing a very intuitive interface.

Incentivized

• You need to take time in adding your contacts to a whitelist so that you don't miss an email.
• I recommend changing the time interval; Barracuda notifies you that you have quarantined emails as we were only getting 1 per day and we missed some urgent emails.
• The quarantine folder is web based, we'd prefer it to have been an add-in for Outlook.

Incentivized

Cost, need to make sure the cost is competitive for how many users are using email protection as we move users to MS Teams and don't rely so much on full access to email accounts (both sending and receiving internal and external).

Incentivized

The end-users love not having their inboxes fill up with extra useless emails. As an administrator, it is simple to implement and maintain. The ability to put something into test mode before going live makes our life a lot easier and less stressful. Avanan has many different components to make your life easier.

Incentivized

Setting up the Barracuda for use with Microsoft 365 provides issues that Barracuda seems to have no fix for. I mentioned these issues to their support, because I am constantly reminded of them by their system, and I was told that those errors are normal for our setup and to ignore them which is frustrating to me.

Incentivized

Always been available as needed.

Incentivized

Availability is robust and flawless. This is a non-issue, its always up & running and fail-over protection is available for restarts or upgrades.

Incentivized

It's not all the time, on occasion the platform can delay email by seven to ten minutes.

Incentivized

The WebUI is the only piece I find lacking on the Barracuda ESK. Its is not the fastest and is fairly utilitarian in its approach. The Outlook plug-in, while not in wide use here, causes zero slowdown in Outlook or the Barracuda ESG.

Incentivized

Support has always been there for me, they take on suggestions and product improvements quite seriously. I've spoken to techs and you can tell that they care about the product and the service in which they deliver. Avanan support is always responsive in everything I throw them and in most cases they don't tell me how to build out a widget or custom query, they actually do it for me and send it to me.

Incentivized

Barracuda Email Security Gateway support is great at responding and escalating cases when needed. Timeliness is key when dealing with email attacks, spoofing or malware. Barracuda also has great resources for end-user training as our end users are our first line of defense in combatting attacks on our company. Training end-users pays off in time spent dealing with any email attacks

Incentivized

There was no in person training.

Incentivized

Takes a lot to get a 10 out of 10.

Incentivized

Ensure system administration and exchange admin are up to speed on Avanan

Incentivized

Avanan has a one-click solution, which subscribers or clients use to deploy a new security update. Further, Avanan has the protection of any cloud application, which means, it bypasses any security threat and maintain the set safety processes. Finally, data leakage is a shield that Avanan has deployed, a very smooth process in the firm.

Incentivized

Barracuda integrates well with Office 365 and mail flow is great. It was the first solution we found that was part of a greater suite to fit all the requirements we had. With the Email Security gateway being in the cloud, it required no extra hardware but also nothing new installed on an endpoint as some solutions require.

Incentivized

It does what they claim and then some.

Incentivized

• Improved risk mitigation by providing additional layer protection for M365.
• Easy to setup and configure. No expert knowledge required and no downtime required.
• Customizable license count. No need to buy the same number of mailbox users if you really don't want to protect some unused mailboxes.

Incentivized

• The gateway learns current scam which can prevent unmeasureable damage. As a government organization attacks on our network affect public safety.
• Previous gateways I have managed have required significant amounts of time grooming. The Barracuda gateway has freed up a great deal of my time due to its intelligence and intent scanning.
• I have very few incidences where a legitimate malicious email will pass through the filter. Just one of these emails can wreak havoc on an organization.

Incentivized