Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense vs. Microsoft 365

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.

I usually recommend Microsoft 365 to my clients to keep them away from the Exchange server (sorry!) Our business has a lot of issues with exchange email functions and copy machines. I always recommend they download the desktop version and use the online version as needed. You never know when you will be without an internet connection, but you can usually trust your laptop will have a decent charge, and you can still be productive! Let it sync when the powers are back on - or your connection is alive.

• 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

• keeps me extremely organized. It is so easy to link calendars, emails, and documents.
• keeps me well connected. It is so easy to send a quick message on teams or send an email to a group (for example, my particular team within the company).
• easy to use. Everything is straightforward, making it easy to find an answer to a question. There is even a search option to figure out how to do something within Microsoft.

• 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

• I wish it was a little simpler to integrate things from one Microsoft Feature into another one. Perhaps I just don't know the tricks for that yet...after all these years of using it.
• I didn't like how it defaulted to saving the document automatically with changes, like Google Docs, but it seems that has now changed, and is better now.
• Generally, I really like how the suite works as is.

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

I am completely satisfied with the product, and helps me on a daily basis. I do not the exact cost (it is not a cheap suite) but on the medium and long term the return on investment is guaranteed.

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

It being the default office suite means it's user experience and idioms are things that everyone is generally very used to and fluent with.

The sharing is relatively simple, being directly hooked into Entra AD, and expiry being a first class concern.

It's usability decreases at scale, with multiple people simultaneously making edits can make documents unusable.

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

Over the past 8 years of using Microsoft 365, I have noticed that they change vendors often. This always leads to a poor experience in the beginning, then levels out after some time for the company to get things worked out. As a customer, it is really frustrating because I don't have time when something isn't working to have them "look into my issue" and get back with me. They have even closed a ticket I specifically told them to keep open. Your applications are only as good as the support.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Everything works and I use it all the time.

Incentivized

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

BTE, this search bar is not the best; I couldn't find Google Suite. In any case, it's challenging to find a suite with advanced tools that serves as an office. Google comes close, no one uses OpenOffice (hyperbole), and there isn't much else to use. If you add to that the recent collaborative functionalities, nothing really stacks up or compares; this has everything a person in an office (oversimplifying) needs to get work done.

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

• Microsoft 365 has really been effective and cost saving option for our organization in terms of managing the mailboxes, collaboration and messaging.
• There is multiple must have features which comes all together in one package and therefore is cost effective.
• The only negative impact according to me is its inability to protect the environment or domain from external attacks effectively.