Barracuda Email Security Gateway vs. SonicWall Email Security Series Appliances

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.

While this solution is capable of managing a smaller environment, I'm weary to install it into a larger customers' environment. This solution does a decent job of basic email security and centrally managed controls. Hardware upgrade options seem limited though if adding a lot more email boxes. Retention options are limited compared to other products.

• 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.

• Simple GUI interface where everything is in one location and easy to use.
• Simple setup, but allows you to be flexible with different security zones.
• Robust, stays up and running.

• 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.

• Manufacturer is focused on several solutions (so likely not enough focus in one area)
• Not the most cost effective solution

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

Availability is robust and flawless. This is a non-issue, its always up & running and fail-over protection is available for restarts or upgrades.

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 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.

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.

We switched from Watchguard to SonicWALL because of the ease of use and everything was located in one place. At the time Watchguard was changing to force you to use a server to manage your VPNs, and we didn't see a reason to have to manage another product when it should have been able to do everything itself. SonicWALL met and exceeded our expectations.

• 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.

• Blocks a majority of spam and malicious emails
• Sandboxing options limited
• Not the best solution out there that we have seen