Barracuda Email Protection vs. AppRiver from OpenText

I would definitely recommend it due to the decent pricing. I wish the MS built-in M365 tools were better, but Barracuda does a good job of taking their place. For industries that need DLP on their email, like healthcare, banking, and education, Barracuda provides a reliable product for a good cost. The additional services you get, malware/AV filtering, URL filtering, spam protection, business continuity, those are all icing on the cake. The only issues we've ever really had with them is that it will sometimes take a back/forth string of emails and decide randomly to encrypt it, so what was a flowing benign conversation is now locked behind a wall for recipients. As the sender, you have no idea when it's going to decide to do this and have to remember to tag emails with a decrypt tag long before it happens or face the consequences

Incentivized

I would highly recommend AppRiver for inbound email filtering. We have been very pleased with the performance and the ease of use. The occasional email does get through, but I have had that happen on any email filtering we have used in the past. Great product and great support as well

Incentivized

• The software helps us create emails that look exactly or almost exactly the same as the phishing emails we found in our email gateway.
• We already use the ESS gateway from Barracuda Networks, and in the TEP bundle, this software is included, so it's not that much work to also configure this.
• In the software, we can see reports on how our users performed. We can make a selection of users that are more prone to click on "false" links, and this way, we can help them individually.

Incentivized

• Ease of management for a MSP. Even though there is no integration w/ PSA tools currently, I don't see this as a negative. The management is multi-tenant and simple to navigate.
• Support via chat is fast and very competent. Only downside is they are just available during extended business hours, not 24x7 on the chat.
• Reselling Office 365 is very simple and gives us an advantage over our competitors. Includes pre sales support and post sale support.
• Encrypted email services act much like others, it works very well and includes and Outlook Plug in to make it obvious you intend to send messaged encrypted.
• Email continuity. Email queuing is included, so if your onsite server goes down, mail queues at the spam filter until service is restored. You can step it up w/ their email continuity service which give you access to your mail at the spam filter in cases where your mail server is down for an extended period of time.

Incentivized

• The #1 feedback I receive from users is that they have limited time for training. It would be nice if the training would be offered in 3-time categories (e.g. up to 3 minutes, up to 5 minutes and up to 10 minutes). This way user's can select a category that matches their availability.

Incentivized

• We had an issue with bills coming to us instead of going directly to the client that took a little longer to fix than we would have preferred.
• It would be nice if the bills included the domain name. When I was receiving my client's bill, it was difficult to tell which domains the bill was for.
• Cost a little more than from Microsoft directly.

Incentivized

Although cost competitive, we still feel like we are not digging deep enough to train our staff. We have little to no way other than digging through reports that have not proven to be adequately documented (hey you, Barracuda campaign reports) to identify and require users to take more training who have not passed their requirements.

Incentivized

Regarding usability, we like it to be an easy solution to implement and configure on the server. Routine backups are made frequently and reports are issued for control and analysis by information security teams. It has great integration with the cloud and encryption.

Incentivized

AppRiver is very easy to use. A new employee can begin using it on their first day.

Incentivized

I have not had to use customer support yet which goes to show the effectiveness of the program. It also shows how easy the program is to use for the average person with no experience using this type of program. Our IT department also does a great job at teaching us to detect emails with malware that in combination with this software issues rarely arise even though we have over 500 employees.

Incentivized

AppRiver's live support is above what I expected, and I use it exclusively. I always get a professional, courteous, and knowledgeable tech that is easy to understand within a few minutes of placing a call. If you do have to leave a message they have always promptly returned my call.

Incentivized

It was "stupid easy" from the technical side.

We really didn't evaluate any other products. We considered using the filtering features that come with our Office 365 subscription, but just didn't feel it was sufficient protection for our business. Being a medical clinic, we felt like we needed to implement the best solution for our email protection and we found Barracuda Essentials was the leader.

Incentivized

AppRiver takes Microsoft 365 and simplifies the billing, provisioning, and support, to the point that we no longer have to deal with Microsoft directly, are able to simply focus on the product, rather than all the settings, setup, and all the other headaches typically associated with setting up a Microsoft365 Tenant.

Incentivized

• This tool was supplied free with out Email Security, so its come at no cost
• This tool has helped us meet requirements by our insurance to train users on the risks of phishing
• However, the dated interface slows down what should be seamless adoption

Incentivized

• We were able to drop our email scanning software that was taking hours to clear the cache of emails daily. The reduction in delays on email scanning improved our efficiency as emails take seconds to minutes to get to where they are going not hours.
• Encrypted email service (Cypher-Post) is difficult to use as well as our recipients do not like how difficult it is to use. The stub emails that contain links often get deleted because people are trained not to click on links in emails. This has caused substantial delays in people getting emails from us.

Incentivized