What is our primary use case?
Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) is being used by our entire organization, helping us to monitor all emails inbound from Microsoft Exchange as well as all outbound emails. Inbound emails are scanned for phishing, malware, spam, viruses, and many more. Additionally, any URL links are protected and have typosquatting protection, giving us high confidence that our incoming and outgoing emails are clean.
How has it helped my organization?
Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) has had a very positive impact on our organization, especially since the pandemic with many remote workers. Our IT objective is 99.9% uptime with many redundant fail-safes in place. Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) helps to meet that objective by protecting the vast amount of email we receive on a daily basis.
I can share specific metrics or results: we've reduced risk by 60% and increased visibility by 70%. Now we have peace of mind in our organization since we know our email is protected. Email protection has dramatically reduced attacks via spam, phishing, and malware in all sectors, enhancing protection and encryption of input and output and preventing data from being leaked from the internal network.
What is most valuable?
The best features Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) offers include advanced threat protection and attachments, malware protection, spam and virus detection, and DDoS attacks prevention.
Out of the features offered, I rely on the comprehensive spam filtering the most, as it is intuitive and reduces the occurrence of spoofing and malware at the source. I also love the sandbox, which is invaluable when determining if an email is legitimate or a malware attempt.
What needs improvement?
Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) can be improved, especially in terms of documentation.
There should be more tutorials and videos online showing how to use all the essential and robust tools of Barracuda, and the reports can also be improved.
I believe there are improvements needed for Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials), such as continuing to improve the user interface to be more intuitive.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) for the past six years and a few months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) is very stable; I have not experienced any downtime or reliability issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) has been very scalable, adapting to my organization's needs effectively.
How are customer service and support?
I have reached out to customer support, and they have been proactive and responsive. I would rate the customer support at nine out of 10.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I previously used a different solution before Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials), though I don't think there was any solution that we were using before Barracuda.
How was the initial setup?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the license cost is very cost-effective, and the price has been very affordable.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment; email protection has dramatically reduced attacks via spam, phishing, and malware in all our sectors, thus improving our security. Peace of mind is guaranteed, and we have been able to save a lot of cost, especially while fighting these attacks.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials), I evaluated other options, including Barracuda Email Security Gateway and Barracuda Backup.
What other advice do I have?
I can give you a quick specific example of a situation where Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) caught something harmful or was particularly helpful for my team: as a HIPAA compliant organization, we must employ security awareness training for our users to comply. Barracuda Security Awareness Training solves the compliance problem while simultaneously educating our users about keeping our users' devices and infrastructure safe. Security awareness training offers more than just HIPAA focused training; we are able to use Barracuda security awareness to train, targeting users, managers, and C-level users with different training types.
My users respond positively to the training; we've noticed fewer incidents of data breaches and other threats. They are now more alert and vigilant. They don't press any links and are quick to communicate with our security IT team in case any suspicious email is seen. The threat has gone down, and security has increased.
Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) offers data protection for our Office 365 through the Exchange email system. This is the way to go. The email archive captures all sent and received email to be processed and searched for any email threat attacks.
I would rate Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) nine out of 10. I choose nine instead of a perfect 10 because it's a very easy-to-use solution to implement and configure on our server. Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) is definitely a great alternative for network security, especially for corporate email to prevent employees from clicking on malicious links, spam, phishing, Trojans, and ransomware. The solution today is implemented in almost all sectors of our company, and we have control of everything and good protection, guaranteeing principles of compliance and security, which makes it a very recommendable tool.
My advice to others looking into using Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) is that it educates my colleagues or team members on what to look out for when they receive a suspicious email. It also educates them on how to easily detect phishing scams, hence making them more alert and reducing security threats. It's a highly recommendable tool for any organization that wants to reduce security threats, especially those that come with emails.
Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) is a great tool and training tool for any environment; it keeps the users aware and helps them spot phishing scams easily. My overall rating for Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) is nine out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?