Barracuda Email Protection vs. Sonian (discontinued)

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

We have had a couple of legal inquiries which required us to review emails for a user or users. Using the Barracuda Cloud Archiving Service, we have been able to perform searches quickly, narrowing or expanding the search criteria is easy, resulting in exactly what we were looking for. This has saved us with claims for collections, as well as a couple of legal HR matters. It is my trusted go to application.

• 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

• Sonian search is rightly praised for ease of use, scale, performance and accuracy.
• Sonian archive can be deployed rapidly without the need for costly professional service engagements.
• Seamless process to import PST files into the archive.
• Sonian has a high focus on compliance and governance which is reflected with their fast and accurate search function.

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.

• Speed is slow sometimes
• The Outlook plugin does not always find all emails when searching

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

It performs as expected with no exceptions.

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

We only need support when initially setting it up. We really have not had to call for user or help support on this product. It has always worked and is always easy to use.

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

Sonian is a pure SaaS solution and is easy to manage and use. It's cost effective and does exactly what it says on the tin

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

• We have been able to reduce a lot of store space by moving all PST files to the archiver.
• Users love how easy it is to find old emails that were deleted long ago.
• Some users now rely on this service