Barracuda Email Protection vs. Clearswift SECURE Email Gateway (SEG)

I would definitely recommend it due to the decent pricing. I wish the MS built-in M365 tools were better, but Barracuda does a good job of taking their place. For industries that need DLP on their email, like healthcare, banking, and education, Barracuda provides a reliable product for a good cost. The additional services you get, malware/AV filtering, URL filtering, spam protection, business continuity, those are all icing on the cake. The only issues we've ever really had with them is that it will sometimes take a back/forth string of emails and decide randomly to encrypt it, so what was a flowing benign conversation is now locked behind a wall for recipients. As the sender, you have no idea when it's going to decide to do this and have to remember to tag emails with a decrypt tag long before it happens or face the consequences

Incentivized

The CS SEG appliances are running as virtual appliances by now. They do need not much power in the ESX environment. I recommend to use at least two peers running in a cluster. The cluster feature is working very well. The CS SEG can process a huge number of emails in a very short time frame.

Incentivized

• Barracuda Essentials Spam Filtering works and it is very easy to add or remove senders from the Spam filter lists.
• Barracuda Essentials provides excellent protection from Phishing and other Malware.
• Barracuda Essentials email encryption is so easy to use and easy to setup. Our users love it.

Incentivized

• CS SEG is fast in email processing
• Managing the quarantine is easy
• Display of the reasons why an email has been processed this is very detailed

Incentivized

• The product is pretty solid so I am not sure how it can be improved. One thing I noticed recently, I am not getting the emails back from Sentinel when I send in a "miss". Used to be I got an email back saying "sorry we missed this, we are improving." That does happen anymore, so I am assuming that when I send a miss, the AI is getting better.
• I would expand this to cover all kinds of email fraud like ransomware and spam rather than creating another product.

• Improvement is needed in the area of AV/Antispam update processing (internally)
• Improvement is needed in the log file processing. Many log file entries are not understandable for an operator or administrator without special insider knowledge
• Clearswift has recently changed the support provider. Now there are no german supporters anymore.

Incentivized

Although cost competitive, we still feel like we are not digging deep enough to train our staff. We have little to no way other than digging through reports that have not proven to be adequately documented (hey you, Barracuda campaign reports) to identify and require users to take more training who have not passed their requirements.

Incentivized

Regarding usability, we like it to be an easy solution to implement and configure on the server. Routine backups are made frequently and reports are issued for control and analysis by information security teams. It has great integration with the cloud and encryption.

Incentivized

I have not had to use customer support yet which goes to show the effectiveness of the program. It also shows how easy the program is to use for the average person with no experience using this type of program. Our IT department also does a great job at teaching us to detect emails with malware that in combination with this software issues rarely arise even though we have over 500 employees.

Incentivized

It was "stupid easy" from the technical side.

We have used several email solutions over the years, some were bought and killed off by larger companies. Barracuda Email Protection offers a very complete solution and has all the tools that we were looking for, and our MSP offered it.

Incentivized

The Clearswift Secure Email Gateway (CS SEG) has very low license costs. A two peer cluster is enough to run a complete emailing gateway environment. Compared to the Proofpoint PPS the CS SEG does not need a management appliance. The CS SEG peers can manage the quarantine by themselves. This is easy to use and quite fast.

Incentivized

• This tool was supplied free with out Email Security, so its come at no cost
• This tool has helped us meet requirements by our insurance to train users on the risks of phishing
• However, the dated interface slows down what should be seamless adoption

Incentivized

• Since this CS SEG environment is operated for a customer, I cannot answer this question

Incentivized