Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense vs. Google Workspace

With Cisco Secure Email, we can easily protect our business email system again all manner of attacks. In addition, we are able to send emails securely thanks to encryption and decryption features. It's, therefore, ideal for businesses that value email privacy, such as those in the accounting industry, hospitals, and law firms, among other users.

Since our company is structured around Google Workspace at the moment, it is well suited for our entire workflow. I do have concerns though, for when it comes time for our company to have our own intranet built and how well the data migration will be from Google Workspace to that intranet that gets built.

Incentivized

• Manages Junk Mail Well-We configured and tested our configuration to filter out the majority of junk mail hitting our inboxes.
• Manages Graymail-We configured and tested our Cisco ETD for graymail filtering and reduced the amount of unwanted advertising and other legitimate emails.
• Creating unique policies that were tailored to block or allow emails from certain senders.
• Stopped malicious email traffic (e.g., malicious attachments and links) with rules for identifying and stripping potentially malicious attachments or links.
• Allows easy configuration for other email security measures such as SPF, DMARC and DKIM.
• Cisco engineers provide an annual free security health check. We took advantage of several security health checks where Cisco certified engineers go over the security setting of our Cisco ETD. We were provided a written report that highlighted strengths and weaknesses of our Cisco ETD setup.
• Monitoring email traffic flow is almost overwhelming with the amount of information you can obtain from the portal. This gives valuable information to IT staff in terms of volume and type of emails the company is receiving.

Incentivized

• It's terrific to have a suite of products that is built to work together, rather than having to piece tools together.
• The email and calendar are the tools I use most often together. I use Gmail through Apple Mail rather than in the browser, and it works great. Also really easy to access and use my calendar.
• I use the other suite of features both for my own company internally and to share files with clients. Super easy to use and share.

Incentivized

• The web interface is definitely dated
• The software updates to the user interface and the documentation online are not congruent. Some docs are old and information is lacking to make changes
• The email filtering and email search features are really dated. And other tools are more user friendly

Incentivized

• A single Google Workspace user should be able to have more than one Google Voice phone number (ideally)
• At times, Google Meet seems a little clumsy (but I think they're about to address that with the new release...It may or may not be better. Who knows? :))
• Some screen layouts are a tad clumsy, but they are sufficiently malleable that once one gets the hang of it, one can customize the environment quite a bit.
• A viable (for small business), relatively-inexpensive, virtual desktop that would include/could include a Windows license or, at least close-to-perfect emulation.
• It would be great if there was accommodation for those who send out a great deal of mail in a given day. Not everyone who does that is a spammer. Although, by Google standards, and relative to some others, Google allows for sending out a good bit of mail, for those who do mass volumes and would prefer not to have their own mail server, it would be good if Google could find a way to accommodate them.

Incentivized

There is a 50/50 chance that we will renew. We are in the middle of moving from on-prem to the cloud so we may not need it once we are fully migrated.

Incentivized

There is no better solution for cloud storage and real time collaboration. The amount of features included in G Suite is unmatched and out of other things we’ve tried over the years, nothing comes close to being as great of a tool.

Incentivized

Good interface, easy to use and set up. If there were any issues, there is very good documentation and videos that one can follow for additional setup and best practices. As typical with most Cisco solutions, there are more features than needed for our purposes but good to know they are there in case of future needs

Incentivized

On the user end, it's great, probably some of the most user friendly products out there. On the admin side, it can get a little more arcane, but it's still better than a lot of other services. At worst I wrangle some CSVs to perform mass changes, but it's a far cry from the days of Powershell scripts or purely manual entry.

Incentivized

Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense's availability is great and reliable when you need it most. We haven't had any noticeable outages or issues.

Incentivized

Cisco always provides good support for all of their solutions. As usual, Cisco support is top notch, from their initial sales teams to the post support, we have always felt comfortable with using Cisco solutions. Their documentation is also very good, frequent updates to the documents with feature enhancements and support notes. All around very good suppot

Incentivized

I have not had to use much support for G Suite, but I imagine it would be a great service, as is everything else that Google provides. I've searched for questions through the help center, and that was easy to use and easy to find. I'm sure I would have no complaints.

Incentivized

The implementation went well, no issues or problems to report.

Incentivized

nothing to say

Cisco SETD, with a broad deployment and full integration with Microsoft 365 gives us a strong protection, especially where we can leverage its strengths: Microsoft‑365 integration, mailbox remediation, policy enforcement, and your visibility across Cisco tools.


Proofpoint is better around user awareness (warning tags etc.), and continuity/archiving. Considering that we have a full Cisco stack, choosing Proofpoint would come with higher cost, learning curve, possible redundancy of features, licensing complexity.

Incentivized

We selected Google Workspace for it's ease of use and clean UI. Microsoft Office granted does have a lot of features and may be more advanced in certain areas (Excel vs sheets), however for the range of functions we need, google workspace provided the necessary features for an affordable price. In particular Outlook compared to Gmail is more outdated and clunky, and I have found more issues with Outlook's deliverability in the past than I do with Gmail. Meet is also much more modern and clean, with useful features like record and Gemini that feel much cleaner than Teams. I have also found that inviting external users (ones that don't use the same workspace as you) is much easier through google meet than teams calls. Drive also has a much cleaner UI, and easier to adopt than OneDrive.

Incentivized

• Up time is as close to 100% as you can get
• Tuning is pretty straight forward and Cisco support is there to help with special tweaks and filter options. At no charge
• Support access is pretty easy to get
• Email threat, filtering, and geolocation verification is updated very regularly

Incentivized

• Google Workspace costs us a little more, but our inboxes are safer for it.
• Our email deliverability has improved significantly. No more lost or bounced emails with our invoices attached. Workspace helps us get paid!
• Our support requests for undelivered email has disappeared.