Barracuda Email Security Gateway vs. Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection (TAP)

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.

I think it is well suited for any organization. It truly gives good insight on the email campaigns that are hitting your company, as well as the people that are being targeted the most and also VIP users such as executives or even other people in IT, cyber, or administrators.

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

• Impostor email detection is a fantastic feature and works very well.
• The sandbox feature helps to ensure confidence that their evaluation of the email threat is valid.
• Easy to use (and understand) dashboard make identifying and managing email threats a breeze.

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

• Their admin web GUI is cumbersome and unclear in many ways. The learning curve is steep so you have to stay up on things yourself whenever a new feature or service is added.
• They sometimes add a feature to their toolbox without informing their customers. This is true even when the feature added does not cost extra.

Incentivized

Not my decision, but I have made it very clear this product does not perform. I have emails from our users on how bad it is after switching to it.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Simple to configure and very straightforward dashboard. Within days of implementation, we were using the dashboard to reduce our response 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

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

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.

Incentivized

Generally have had good response and resolution time with knowledgeable technicians, and if needed the ticket is moved to someone with more expertise to better address the issue. Have used the ticketing portal, phone, as well as the beta chat feature (permanent please!)

Incentivized

Proofpoint managed the installation and made it very simple. We had a dedicated installation engineer who checked in on use periodically after go-live to ensure that there were no issue.

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

Besides using the default native protection in the email product itself, we have not looked closely at other email security products. But going with Proofpoint is the right choice. When our leadership team has concerns about malware attacks, we just tell them that we have the security in place using Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection for Email. And we don't just tell them, we provide them the reports coming out of Proofpoint which show the threats being blocked and the metrics.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Saves IT time when an attack is successful and isn't reported in a timely manner or at all until damages are done. IT has to spend less time and effort because we are able to stop it before it spreads.
• Protecting business resources and assets is a huge positive impact. TAP allows us to better protect our business and information within.
• The only negative thing is that it doesn't automatically handle these attacks - but that is what TRAP is for! I wish Proofpoint bundled TAP and TRAP.

Incentivized