Barracuda Email Security Service - No-frills email security and attachment sandboxing!
June 28, 2019
Barracuda Email Security Service - No-frills email security and attachment sandboxing!
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Barracuda Email Security Service
Barracuda Email Security Service (ESS) is the anti-spam, anti-phishing, and general anti-bad stuff product in use by the entire organization since early 2017. The heuristics, content/sender policies and sandboxing help us solve the complex problem of "how do you stop the entire Internet from trying to kill you and/or rob you via email?"
- 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.
- Barracuda's Multi Factor Authentication is terrible, I had to get my MFA removed by support because it would consistently fail to work.
- The web interface is a bit dated and occasionally does weird things when you click it - it's a unified console for all Barracuda products, not just ESS.
- Complete lack of geoblocking features. We would love to block countries we don't do business with, but that's not an option.
- No Outlook plugin for the ESS cloud service; all blacklist/whitelist/etc must be done via the web interface
- The cost of ESS for our organization is tiny compared to the amount of money we would lose if even one virus-laden PDF slipped through
- Ignoring genuine malware/phishing, the cost of ESS for our organization is tiny compared to the amount of money we save by blocking regular spam (so employees don't ever see it)
- From an administrator's perspective, putting the reins in the hands of our employees so they can look at their own quarantine (and leave IT out of it) has saved us 💵DOLLA 💸DOLLA💵BILLS 💸Y'ALL💵
We switched from an IronPort appliance to ESS in the cloud after evaluating several others, and have evaluated competitors at each renewal since then. The only services that come close are MimeCast and Proofpoint; if I were making the decision again today, it would definitely be a shootout between these three.