Barracuda ESG (discontinued) vs. Mimecast Advanced Email Security

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.

Mimecast's advanced email security remains the number one security tool available for any organization. You will be ahead of the game before anything gets in and users start clicking. Users are often the ones who can disclose sensitive data and compromise the organization and its brand.

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

• Simplicity: Once set up, Mimecast Advanced Email Security is easy to use, intuitive, and simple. This reduces onboarding time with new employees.
• Robust Audit Trail: Being able to see what happened with specific emails, why things happened, and who was responsible for them helps to reduce troubleshooting time as well as improving overall email observability.
• Clean Interface: Mimecast Advanced Email Security is a Swiss-Army-Knife of email security. There are many different configurations and complex rules that can be implemented. To make this manageable Mimecast Advanced Email Security has implemented a simple and clean UI. Being able to favorite commonly used features makes a huge difference in usability.
• Simple SSO Integration: This seems like a no-brainer, but its odd to see how many SaaS products either don't support SSO, or make it so complicated and convoluted that setup and maintenance becomes a fully time job.

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

• I would like to see some additional improvement around the attachment protection, specifically what may be getting caught and what types of files are attempting to be delivered via email by impersonators.
• The Targeted Threat Protection is a great product, and I wish there was a dashboard for this service where we could easily see the types of emails and/or links that have been caught as part of the protection module that could be shared with executives.
• Finally, I feel that the phishing protection is great and honestly don't believe there should be much improvement needed there.

Incentivized

There is no question as to the value of the product to the business and the disruption of changing vendors would not be worth any savings possibly achieved by switching.

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

The console is nice, but it could use some improvements for day to day activities for Admins. I find I am jumping around all over to get what I need (always searching for the right area). Being able to customize a Dashboard or having a central typical activities dashboard will be helpful to save more time.

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

Overall, it's very good, but I do remember a few times in the past year we have seen some availability issues.

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

Pages need to consistently load quickly. Sometimes good, sometimes not.

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

When calling them you get best in the world customer services but as previously mentioned their online community and capabilities are a bit lacking. They want you to log into their portal to see updates on issues (vs. using a public facing service) and I rarely find the answers to my issues in electronic format. Their online presence is only helpful with the simplest of issues.

Incentivized

We did not have in-person training. All was done through meetings and on phone.

Incentivized

Training was good from Mimecast as well as the Mimecast knowledgebase.

Incentivized

Easy to set up and configure, but did have Mimecast assistance.

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

In my opinion, Mimecast Advanced Email Security outpaces Microsoft in terms of usability and reduction of spam and phishing emails. Mimecast Advanced Email Security was cheaper than Proofpoint, but I suspect Proofpoint is doing better on staying current with trends than Mimecast Advanced Email Security. I think Abnormal offers the best incoming email security, but does not offer outgoing email data loss prevention or encryption, which is a key use cast for us.

Incentivized

The solution continues to grow and add features.

Incentivized

Professional services for our setup was excellent, quick and knowledgeable.

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

• Enhanced email security across the business.
• This product has reduced the risk of being hit by malware/phishing; Mimecast has been holding emails efficiently after reviewing emails.
• The reporting side is practical, helps create a business case for the product, and shows its worth.

Incentivized