Barracuda ESG were physical or virtual appliances designed to protect email servers from spam, virus, spoofing, phishing and spyware attacks. The product line is discontinued.
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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (formerly Microsoft Defender ATP) is a holistic, cloud delivered endpoint security solution that includes risk-based vulnerability management and assessment, attack surface reduction, behavioral based and cloud-powered next generation protection, endpoint detection and response (EDR), automatic investigation and remediation, managed hunting services, rich APIs, and unified security management.
Barracuda was selected purely on a need and cost basis during the course our selection for an SEG. We needed a tool that could be set up fairly quickly and block and detect against spam and malicious emails. It did not compare in efficacy or ease of use to Mimecast, however it …
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.
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is easy to deployed across the entire organization. Having a cloud based solution with a single pane of glass to manage all assets is a real no-brainer. Being able to receive immediate alerts when suspicious activity occurs is extremely helpful in keeping risks at a minimum. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint management is also smart enough to not send several alerts when an attack could be hitting multiple targets within a certain time frame or when it's the same attack multiple times. However, be prepared to click through multiple pages all over the site to figure out what happened when an attack occurs.
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.
One, it's crazy lightweight, so compared to some of the competitors that we also have used with our security services, it's really lightweight and so I don't have a lot of overhead on the system that it's running on.
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.
Cost add-ons for Security features is nickel and diming the process to keep pace with cybercrime. Limited Education budgets require us to be more pro-active in finding cost-effective measures to protect our devices, staff and students. Defender is a strong, well-featured product that is pricing itself out of the education market
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.
It offers multiple security features and integrates well with Microsoft ecosystems. A workflow for threat detection, investigation, automated remediation, and a centralized dashboard is an added advantage. This application is mainly designed for experienced users; new users may feel challenged.
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint chugs along just fine no matter what we throw at it and what systems it's running on. It doesn't take up a lot of resources either, so that's welcomed.
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.
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
The first time I tried to onboard my macOS endpoints to MDE I struggled for quite a bit. I had to reach out to Microsoft's MDE support team. The tech was very helpful in walking me through the steps during a screen share session
Deployment was handled by our team here and everything went pretty smoothly. We did have a few hiccups in our test group, but that only took a bit to get ironed out.
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.
Defender is far easier to deploy and manage than Sophos and tends to work without as many issues. The threat assessment portal provides an in-depth view of the organization's security posture, whereas Sophos only shows the patching status of the PCs. We did need Intune to get many of the control features (disabling USB drives) that Sophos offered out of the box.
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.
