Sophos Email vs. Symantec Messaging Gateway

The Sophos email solution is a good fit for my organization which is a mid-size resort with 200 users. Sophos email has revealed unwanted emails that were getting through our built in Microsoft email security scanning and policies so having this extra layer was a no brainier. With that we were able to focus on the bad stuff and even tweak our products with this information from Sophos email.

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

• We could customize it to have a certain level of workflow. We manage to enforce certain email (based on key-phrases) to be quarantined before send it to the recipient. And the email needs to be approved (manually) before being released.
• For certain type (using regex) of email, we will encrypt it if it's sent outside our organization domain.
• Scalable

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• I would love to see tips integrated into the user interface from the management side to allow for easier dissection of email headers. This would allow lower level admins that may work at smaller companies to better understand the information presented.

Incentivized

• The web interface can be difficult at times.

Incentivized

It was easy to use and easy to implement. You don't need previous knowledge on the products, after we got this up and running, it took us hours to put everything together. The transition was easy and seamless.

Incentivized

It's mostly great and for policies and features, it does everything we would ask it to and more. The only thing keeping it from being a 10 is the lack of granularity in the reporting, which is actually an issue within Sophos Central as a whole. The ability to drill down from dashboards into accurate, detailed data would be very helpful at times.

Incentivized

Support is slow to respond. They call back outside of normal business hours despite clearly being advised when they should call. They try to BS you that the platform is working properly although there is hard evidence to the contrary. Once you get to senior level of support they agree that the product is incapable of performing properly in its current iteration.

I have only tried Sophos Email, and I find it to be a very useful tool, as it protects against information leakage such as fraudulent emails, cloud sandboxing and quarantine, which are essential functions and the product works excellent.

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

Incentivized

• Sophos Email has been protecting our users, including the administrative branch, who are the target of attacks most frequently.
• Every month Sophos Email stops about 100,000 malicious emails. We calculate that if these attacks have saved the company time, it prevents us from having a lot of support staff to attend to the cases.

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