Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense vs. Symantec Messaging Gateway

I will certainly recommend Cisco Secure Email to my friends/colleagues, one look at the dashboard/statistics will actually convince any IT professional to use this product. We noticed an outstanding improvement in Email quality, most of the SPAM emails are caught, and our users have never been happier!

Incentivized

It is very well suited for an organization that wants to protect inbound email and use just one product. It may be less appropriate for an organization that is small or has a limited IT support staff.

Incentivized

• Manages Junk Mail Well-We configured and tested our configuration to filter out the majority of junk mail hitting our inboxes.
• Manages Graymail-We configured and tested our Cisco ETD for graymail filtering and reduced the amount of unwanted advertising and other legitimate emails.
• Creating unique policies that were tailored to block or allow emails from certain senders.
• Stopped malicious email traffic (e.g., malicious attachments and links) with rules for identifying and stripping potentially malicious attachments or links.
• Allows easy configuration for other email security measures such as SPF, DMARC and DKIM.
• Cisco engineers provide an annual free security health check. We took advantage of several security health checks where Cisco certified engineers go over the security setting of our Cisco ETD. We were provided a written report that highlighted strengths and weaknesses of our Cisco ETD setup.
• Monitoring email traffic flow is almost overwhelming with the amount of information you can obtain from the portal. This gives valuable information to IT staff in terms of volume and type of emails the company is receiving.

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• Prevents SPAM attacks.
• Filters email based on content.
• Blocks phishing links.
• Blocks ransomware links/attacks.

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• The web interface is definitely dated
• The software updates to the user interface and the documentation online are not congruent. Some docs are old and information is lacking to make changes
• The email filtering and email search features are really dated. And other tools are more user friendly

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• The web interface can be difficult at times.

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There is a 50/50 chance that we will renew. We are in the middle of moving from on-prem to the cloud so we may not need it once we are fully migrated.

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Good interface, easy to use and set up. If there were any issues, there is very good documentation and videos that one can follow for additional setup and best practices. As typical with most Cisco solutions, there are more features than needed for our purposes but good to know they are there in case of future needs

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Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense's availability is great and reliable when you need it most. We haven't had any noticeable outages or issues.

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Cisco always provides good support for all of their solutions. As usual, Cisco support is top notch, from their initial sales teams to the post support, we have always felt comfortable with using Cisco solutions. Their documentation is also very good, frequent updates to the documents with feature enhancements and support notes. All around very good suppot

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The implementation went well, no issues or problems to report.

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Cisco SETD, with a broad deployment and full integration with Microsoft 365 gives us a strong protection, especially where we can leverage its strengths: Microsoft‑365 integration, mailbox remediation, policy enforcement, and your visibility across Cisco tools.


Proofpoint is better around user awareness (warning tags etc.), and continuity/archiving. Considering that we have a full Cisco stack, choosing Proofpoint would come with higher cost, learning curve, possible redundancy of features, licensing complexity.

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Without mentioning some of the other products by name, I can tell you that Symantec Messaging Gateway is one of the best.

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• Our email security has increased.
• Users are now more confident about their email security.
• Management of threat detection and prevention has become easier.
• Finer controls on spam filtering gives customization capability.
• GDPR compliance ensures peace of mind from a regulation point of view.
• The quarantine feature has ensured that we do not lose important emails while they are being analyzed.

Incentivized

• It would be difficult to determine the exact ROI Symantec Messaging Gateway had on your overall business. However, I can assure you the downtime suffered due to inbound email threats has been reduced to nearly zero in our environment. If IT isn't chasing down ransomware/phishing issues and users aren't staring at a quarantined PC, life is good.
• There are no negative impacts on ROI that I can think of.

Incentivized