McAfee Email Gateway (Discontinued) vs. Sophos Email

Comparable to a Barracuda email appliance, these units retain email that is quarantined as well as provide cloud layer to support it. It is best suited for a medium size company as the devices are often not as scalable as Barracuda.

Incentivized

I strongly believe that if you are looking for a product that does what it says on the box and has the capacity to keep your company safe, you should look at Sophos. They have consistently been at the top of their game and continue to provide a product that meets the ever-changing needs of the threat landscape.

Incentivized

• Filtering system is very strong, more often than not blocks bad email.
• Does fine job filtering and configuring content filtering for extension types such as ZIP or RAR.
• Intermediary between Internet and email system provides extra layer of security including ability to spool email in the event of an email system outage.
• Outbound encryption feature is very useful for security purposes.

Incentivized

• We could customize it to have a certain level of workflow. We manage to enforce certain email (based on key-phrases) to be quarantined before send it to the recipient. And the email needs to be approved (manually) before being released.
• For certain type (using regex) of email, we will encrypt it if it's sent outside our organization domain.
• Scalable

Incentivized

• The onsite appliances have end-of-life forcing an upgrade to new unit.
• Many of the appliances have been end-of-life and seems McAfee may not be offering the service in the future.

Incentivized

• Reporting could be more granular, it's the most glaring weakness of the product.
• The ability to drill down into data from the dashboard would be very helpful for reporting as well.
• Reverse AD sync so when active directory users are removed, they are removed from Sophos as well would be helpful.

Incentivized

It was easy to use and easy to implement. You don't need previous knowledge on the products, after we got this up and running, it took us hours to put everything together. The transition was easy and seamless.

Incentivized

The solution is very scalable, with a possibility to be customized; which means that Sophos Email can be configured depending on our own situation and context not on a general way. On the other hand, Sophos Email has a broad feature set; I mean, along with core spam and malware protection, Sophos offers advanced features such as real-time
link following, threat isolation, spoof protection, etc.

I have always found the answers I have needed in the documentation or online, and have not needed to contact Sophos Secure Email Gateways' support team. This, I think, bodes well for how their software is easy to use and has good documentation when you cannot find what you need in the basic interface.

Incentivized

Barracuda provides two product options, the ESS cloud-only filtering, and onsite Email Security Gateway appliances. Unless compliance needs require the on-premises device, the ESS option easily beats the McAfee Email Gateway.

Incentivized

Many other solutions are a complicated setup and take a lot of time for the configuration. With Sophos email we were setup and seeing data/emails within an hour. As I have described the ease of use from a high-level for someone like me a Director just peeking into the system or an analyst that can do a deep dive is one of the best users interfaces I have seen for any product.

Incentivized

• The end-of-life of appliances is unfortunate as it forces a purchase of a replacement unit. Barracuda devices have a 4-year refresh cycle so purchasing additional hardware is rarely necessary.
• McAfee seems to be phasing out the service over time.

Incentivized

• We have prevented several cases of employees tried to steal organization's information; this has a great effect on the ROI not only in dollars but also in our reputation.
• We have used it for more than 4 years, which is more than typical technology adoption we usually do; and this is the result of the above causes (prevention of internal fraud).
• Need to have an expert of regex to accommodate more advanced DLP function/requirements

Incentivized