Barracuda ESG (discontinued) vs. Proofpoint Email Protection

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.

Well suited: Proofpoint does a pretty good job at protecting us from spam emails. I was able to block a lot of emails coming from SendGrid by blocking SendGrid emails with a custom spam filter. However, SendGrid has a lot of legit emails too so I was able to create another rule to allow those emails from certain people, then block the rest. That way business need was met but spam emails are blocked. Less Appropriate If you are trying to monitor internal to internal emails Proofpoint is probably a little over featured for that.

Incentivized

• Stops unwanted emails coming through to your inbox, it does this by holding them in a 'quarantine' folder for you to then check and allow or deny.
• Protects against phishing and ransomware attacks.
• Stops employees clicking on dangerous links in emails by putting them in a secure place.

Incentivized

• Spam - catches these emails before hitting the inbox.
• Daily digest - provides users with a list of the emails that were blocked and allows them to choose to release them if they are legitimate emails.
• Ensures that emails coming into our organization is safe for our users and verifies the email is coming from stated senders email server.

Incentivized

• The appliance has a feature to block all office macros. This is a great feature but only has an on/off setting. I would like to see the additional of allowing exclusions for users who need to receive office macros.
• The feature for email encryption is great and allows us to not require an additional product or service for this. Unfortunately this is similar to the office macro feature and does not allow exclusions. The setting automatically detects information like credit cards, social security numbers, and other sensitive information. I have a user who works with Japanese companies. Japanese phone numbers apparently trigger the SSN filter. I wish I could put an exclusion in for this recipient or sender.
• I wish the appliance had an auto firmware update option. Where non major releases would be automatically installed.

Incentivized

• The pricing is high and there are many licenses for things I feel should be part of other products.
• The UI is slightly dated and has a lot of room for improvement.
• The separate products should have one pane of glass for administration. Currently, if you own several of the products it feels quite disjointed when using them.

Incentivized

Setting up the Barracuda for use with Microsoft 365 provides issues that Barracuda seems to have no fix for. I mentioned these issues to their support, because I am constantly reminded of them by their system, and I was told that those errors are normal for our setup and to ignore them which is frustrating to me.

Incentivized

Very robust and solid product in protecting our emails. The engineers who assisted with our implementation was very knowledgable and great to work with. Easy to use by end-users. Administration and management are also easy for IT. Great dashboard and reporting tools for business reviews.

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

There were no appliance errors or unplanned outages during five years of operation.

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

Most important thing is the performance of processing mails. Even in a complex environment the system keeps performing on a very high Level.

Incentivized

Barracuda Email Security Gateway support is great at responding and escalating cases when needed. Timeliness is key when dealing with email attacks, spoofing or malware. Barracuda also has great resources for end-user training as our end users are our first line of defense in combatting attacks on our company. Training end-users pays off in time spent dealing with any email attacks

Incentivized

We use ProofPoint support quite often to fix issues and assist with setting up features and rules. Each time we have created a ticket, they have been very helpful and respectful. Each ticket has been treated with the appropriate SLA time and attention. We also enjoy the regular check-ins from the engineers when tickets are open but we get busy with other tasks.

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

Proofpoint Email Protection allows configuration and granularity that far exceeds those features we'd been able to use with the Barracuda Email Security Gateway product. In addition, the robust Proofpoint reporting features give us and our decision makers much improved detail to make informed decisions about our security posture.

Incentivized

You can add a lot of agents to your environment if you need them. And you can operate hardware appliances and virtual appliances in the same cluster.

Incentivized

• 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💵

Incentivized

• Having easy-to-reach backups of all employee emails has made Proofpoint worth it by itself. That plus the countless times that spam/malicious emails did not make it through to the intended person that could have potentially cost the organization a lot of money.

Incentivized