Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense vs. Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection (TAP)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense provides protection against email threats that compromise an organization’s brand and operations. Its advanced threat detection capabilities uncover known, emerging and targeted threats. And it expands the scope of organizations' defenses to detect dangerous threats and rapidly search for and remediate threats across security controls. Secure Email Threat Defense's Artificial Intelligence and machine…N/A
Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection (TAP)
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection (TAP) helps organizations efficiently detect, mitigate and respond to known and unknown advanced threats that target people and VIPs through email. TAP provides unparalleled effectiveness in stopping targeted attacks that use polymorphic malware, weaponized documents and credential-stealing phishing techniques to obtain sensitive information. TAP seamlessly integrates with the Proofpoint secure email gateway (Proofpoint Email Protection) to deliver best…N/A
Pricing
Cisco Secure Email Threat DefenseProofpoint Targeted Attack Protection (TAP)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco Secure Email Threat DefenseProofpoint Targeted Attack Protection (TAP)
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco Secure Email Threat DefenseProofpoint Targeted Attack Protection (TAP)
Features
Cisco Secure Email Threat DefenseProofpoint Targeted Attack Protection (TAP)
Secure Email Gateway
Comparison of Secure Email Gateway features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
8.4
Ratings
0% above category average
Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection (TAP)
-
Ratings
Anti-malware8.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizability8.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Loss Protection8.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Threat Detection8.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Sandboxing8.10 Ratings00 Ratings
End-to-End Encryption8.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Management Tools7.20 Ratings00 Ratings
User Ratings
Cisco Secure Email Threat DefenseProofpoint Targeted Attack Protection (TAP)
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
5.0
(0 ratings)
5.3
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.2
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.9
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco Secure Email Threat DefenseProofpoint Targeted Attack Protection (TAP)
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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I think it is well suited for any organization. It truly gives good insight on the email campaigns that are hitting your company, as well as the people that are being targeted the most and also VIP users such as executives or even other people in IT, cyber, or administrators.
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Pros
  • 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.
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  • TAP allows administrators and authorized users to effectively analyze threats and identify all targets.
  • The tracking (did a user open an email, did they click a link and how many times) and analytics are a great asset to have for any IT admin.
  • The ability to flag specific users as VIPs or important folks you want to keep an extra measure of attention on.
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Cons
  • 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
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  • Their admin web GUI is cumbersome and unclear in many ways. The learning curve is steep so you have to stay up on things yourself whenever a new feature or service is added.
  • They sometimes add a feature to their toolbox without informing their customers. This is true even when the feature added does not cost extra.
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Likelihood to Renew
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.
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Not my decision, but I have made it very clear this product does not perform. I have emails from our users on how bad it is after switching to it.
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Usability
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
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The interface is simple to use but still contains the information needed to conduct thorough investigations. If you own licenses for other Proofpoint tools, Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection is easily accessible from those applications. The ability to sandbox URLs within the TAP interface is a great feature as well. The overall performance of the GUI is seamless, especially if enabled with your organization's SSO.
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Reliability and Availability
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.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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
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Generally have had good response and resolution time with knowledgeable technicians, and if needed the ticket is moved to someone with more expertise to better address the issue. Have used the ticketing portal, phone, as well as the beta chat feature (permanent please!)
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Implementation Rating
The implementation went well, no issues or problems to report.
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Proofpoint managed the installation and made it very simple. We had a dedicated installation engineer who checked in on use periodically after go-live to ensure that there were no issue.
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Alternatives Considered
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.
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While both Abnormal Security and Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection are email-based security applications, they each have their specific strengths. Abnormal is a great "first line of defense" with its machine learning capabilities and proactively blocking malicious or spam emails. Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection is for when applications like Abnormal Security fail and let malicious phishing emails through.
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Return on Investment
  • 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
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  • The cost associated with a successful threat (such as a spoofed wire transfer) far exceeds the cost of the Proofpoint TAP system.
  • It is hard to quantify the actual amount saved by threats that TAP has prevented, but I feel that it is an excellent value (and piece of mind).
  • The TAP saves us money and increases productivity by reducing the amount of malicious and SPAM emails.
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ScreenShots

Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense Screenshots

Screenshot of an Impact Report showing efficacy metrics and ROI indicatorsScreenshot of a detailed view of phishing messagesScreenshot of the dashboard