Barracuda Essentials is an email security platform designed to protect users and businesses from volumetric threats like malware and spam, as well advanced threats like targeted spear phishing and ransomware, and provides email archiving and data protection from corruption and deletion with cloud backup and recovery of emails and files, data leak prevention and encryption.
N/A
Cisco Secure Endpoint
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Secure Endpoint (formerly Cisco Advanced Malware Protection [AMP] for Endpoints) offers cloud-delivered next-generation antivirus, endpoint protection platform (EPP), and advanced endpoint detection and response (EDR).
The Barracuda Essentials solution is definitely a great alternative to network security and especially corporate email to prevent employees from clicking on malicious links, spam, phishing, trojans and ransonware. The solution today is implemented in almost all sectors of the company and we have control of everything and good protection guaranteeing principles of compliance and security.
Cisco Secure Endpoint is well suited for keeping track of the many different and points that we have in our organization. All of these devices can easily be monitored with Cisco Secure Endpoint. It can monitor our servers and our desktops and laptops in our environment. It isn’t as appropriate for our student devices. However, those aren’t as critical since they are just Chromebooks.
Once we, I guess one turned out that path because we have a small IT team, one of the big factors that came into play is how easy it was to deploy and the kind of security it provides for your endpoint devices. For us, it's got all those AI capabilities that really help. So traditionally when there was an incident on Alert on an antivirus program, you'd have a couple of guys run across the office to try to pull a plug. One of the awesome features with Secure Endpoint is its isolation mode that clamps down endpoint devices and then just isolate it. It's connected to, I think Cisco's tell us the threat intel environment. So they've got up-to-date metrics and fixes on threats out in the wild. And once they detect that, they apply it across your whole brand. So yeah, really effective for us.
One of the things that really stands out is the retrospective detections. So say something's detected two weeks later of a product that you had on your system. Initially it scanned it past, but then they discover vulnerability. The product has the ability to come back and retrospectively apply restrictions on specific applications you have on your environment. So I think that's one key winner.
Encryption is always on. There's NO way to turn it off so false encryption leads to real issues. Many banks and other companies cannot read/accept encrypted email. There should be a "Do Not Encrypt" type of keyword to prevent encryption (competing products have this).
There's no indication an email was encrypted (like with Proofpoint or ZIX mail).
MSP management interface needs work. You have to request licenses by email and wait. Pretty archaic today. Most competing product sites let MSP's increase/decrease licensing as needed, immediately.
The interface has many views that all look the same, except that functionalities are different. This makes it incredibly difficult to find the action you want to take.
Built-in exclusion sets are missing a number of notable Anti-Malware products and must be manually implemented.
High learning curve due to complexity of the solution and the range of features it contains. Provided documentation is hidden in a small icon at the top of the page which is often off-screen when needed.
Color choices lead to panic situations during deployment. 1 questionable file could lead to the main display showing a large, bright red alert which makes customers think their whole environment is compromised.
Barracuda Essentials is simple to use. It has a user dashboard that is simple to navigate even for those who have few computer skills. One can barely realize that the program is even running in the background heading off those emails that can cause damage to my computer or our overall system.
AMP is very difficult to use compared to other products we've seen. It's hard to understand why there are so many different logins for the various products that supposedly integrate with AMP. We had weekly phone calls for months to implement the product yet none of the IT department really enjoys using this product or feels comfortable with the accuracy of detections. The number of false positives is high.
This is the best tool in the industry. It provides the best support on top of the product. If one has any trouble configuring things or troubleshooting things, Barracuda's support is renowned for resolving bugs and issues as well as assisting troubleshooting and fixing issues. I would highly recommend it as it covers all email security bases.
In terms of technical support for Cisco Secure Endpoint, the support has been pretty good. All the cases I submitted were solved in a reasonable time frame, and it was a good experience. However, I find that not as many vendors have the expertise I would expect.
Barracuda Essentials has a far easier admin pannel than is provided by mimecast along with far more filtering options such as dkim. Much easier to do the initial setup along with much better support provided. Barracuda Essentials has Advanced threat protection that uses AI to spot patterns and gives you the option to remove a suspect email from all inboxs
Cisco Secure Endpoint is an advanced EDR solution that is highly effective and scalable. Our experience previously with MalwareBytes and Microsoft Defender was not horrible, but these products were not as effective and did not integrate well with our other security products to allow us to monitor and react quickly to address threats that were within our network. Key to any security effort is mitigation and the ability to quickly identify and respond so any damage can be avoided or limited.
Barracuda Essentials has had a very positive impact especially since the Pandemic with many remote workers. Our IT objective is 99.9% uptime with many redundancy fail safes in place. Barracuda Essentials helps meet that objective by protecting the vast amount of email we receive daily.
AMP has been able to catch some serious infections and stop them from doing huge damage in our environment.
The overall cost of AMP vs the cost of not having this protection and getting hit with malware, or other nefarious damage to your environment is well worth the money.
