Barracuda Email Security Gateway vs. McAfee Email Gateway (Discontinued)

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.

Comparable to a Barracuda email appliance, these units retain email that is quarantined as well as provide cloud layer to support it. It is best suited for a medium size company as the devices are often not as scalable as Barracuda.

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

• Filtering system is very strong, more often than not blocks bad email.
• Does fine job filtering and configuring content filtering for extension types such as ZIP or RAR.
• Intermediary between Internet and email system provides extra layer of security including ability to spool email in the event of an email system outage.
• Outbound encryption feature is very useful for security purposes.

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

• The onsite appliances have end-of-life forcing an upgrade to new unit.
• Many of the appliances have been end-of-life and seems McAfee may not be offering the service in the future.

Incentivized

So far we have had limited problems the one's we have had we can attribute to poor user judgement not our gateway failing. One of the best features is the Barracuda is intuitive to choices we make on blocking or rejecting emails which is a great feature. lessens are need to repetitively enter the same information

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

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

Barracuda customer support is great. Most of the time when I can an actual tech support representative answers, not some person that will just take a message. If one is not available I will receive a call back in a very short time.

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

Barracuda provides two product options, the ESS cloud-only filtering, and onsite Email Security Gateway appliances. Unless compliance needs require the on-premises device, the ESS option easily beats the McAfee Email Gateway.

Incentivized

• Allows us to set it and forget it. We don't have to worry about patch or upgrade to a newer version. Barracuda does it all for us.
• DLP has been great. That's a risk which is hard to monitor but Barracuda does it effortlessly.

Incentivized

• The end-of-life of appliances is unfortunate as it forces a purchase of a replacement unit. Barracuda devices have a 4-year refresh cycle so purchasing additional hardware is rarely necessary.
• McAfee seems to be phasing out the service over time.

Incentivized