Barracuda Email Protection vs. PhishRod

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

PhishRod has helped us create mock phishing attacks throughout our company to help teach our users what to look for in a phishing attack. The ability to create custom attacks has helped tremendously because we are able to use attacks related to what we encounter on a daily basis. Creating training phishing attack emails has helped improve our overall security.

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

• Customize Phishing Campaigns
• Awareness Manager
• Policy Compliance

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

• Impoving OT Cyber Security Training
• Additional Capabilities
• Some issues with product interface

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

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

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

We tested both PhishRod and Phisher for our security needs. They are similar, but in the end we feel that PhishRod was better suited for our needs. Pricing was better and the ROI as well. We are looking for a long term solution and believe we have found it in PhishRod.

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

• More secure users
• Lower chance of attacks making it through
• Overall smarter workforce

Incentivized