Barracuda Email Security Gateway vs. Sophos Email

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.

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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

• 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

• 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