Perception Point Advanced Email Security Reviews

Perception Point Advanced Email Security specializes in email security, though it includes different products like collaboration security and browser security. Customers are looking for these additional capabilities. I am not recommending the browser security of Perception Point Advanced Email Security because it is not sufficiently matured and is still in the development phase.

The primary use cases are definitely centered on email security, such as protecting emails from malicious content and spam, along with compliance. Compliance is a significant use case, particularly in the GCC region and MENA region where regulatory requirements are substantial.

I have been working with Perception Point Advanced Email Security for the last three years and have witnessed considerable improvements on the product side. The R&D team has enhanced the platform significantly by adding features such as People Posture, Security Posture, and Threat Intelligence. The platform continues to improve daily, and following the acquisition by Fortinet, I can see substantial improvements.

The account takeover feature in Perception Point Advanced Email Security is exceptional, and it has been integrated with People Posture. Account takeover is now combined with the Identity and Access Management of Office 365 or G Suite, providing a comprehensive threat intelligence dashboard that correlates ATO attempts with Identity and Access Management data from the tenant.

Multi-layer detection in Perception Point Advanced Email Security functions effectively, though the underlying technology remains unchanged. The seven-layer technology is patented and remains consistent. However, improvements are occurring through algorithm updates daily. The algorithms leverage machine learning technology and are continuously updated as attack scenarios evolve. The detection is seamless, though no changes have been made to the layers themselves.

Perception Point Advanced Email Security has a strong anti-phishing module that addresses both traditional phishing and qishing attempts. The QR code-based phishing attempts can be reversed using image recognition technology and zero-day technology. Any phishing zero-day attacks can be easily prevented. Compared to other products, the false positive rates are significantly lower in Perception Point Advanced Email Security.

I would rate the effectiveness of Deep Content Disarm in Perception Point Advanced Email Security at 8.5 out of 10. I give this rating because of the recent improvements in the product and the significant effort the company is investing in R&D, which instills confidence in the product.

Perception Point Advanced Email Security offers graphical reporting options with strong reporting capabilities. I can recommend the product and would prioritize it as a first or second choice when recommending to customers or during presales activities.

The sandboxing feature in Perception Point Advanced Email Security functions effectively, though the technology itself has not changed. The product includes two-level sandboxing: application level and CPU level. At the CPU level, both Mac and Windows CPU sandboxing are available. No technological changes have occurred in this area, though updates are continuously implemented, including pre-execution sandboxing and filtration improvements. The algorithms are updated daily.

The primary area for improvement in Perception Point Advanced Email Security is the need for more integrations with XDR solutions. Currently, XDR integration exists with Symantec and CrowdStrike, but additional integrations are needed. I have found that the CrowdStrike integration, specifically the Falcon integration, has been experiencing issues recently. This represents another area requiring improvement.

Integration capabilities are particularly important because companies are increasingly transitioning to their own SOC platforms or SIEM solutions to ensure complete environmental integration and security. MDR technology has emerged as a significant market offering, and Perception Point Advanced Email Security should develop integrations with additional solutions in this space.

I am fully satisfied with the functionality of Perception Point Advanced Email Security because we have more than 200 customers using this product. We are retaining approximately 85 to 90 percent of our customers with this solution. All customers are satisfied, and we ourselves are satisfied with the product with no plans to change it. The only area for improvement is the integration capabilities.

I have been working with Perception Point Advanced Email Security for the last three years.

I would rate the stability of Perception Point Advanced Email Security at nine out of ten.

Perception Point Advanced Email Security demonstrates excellent scalability, and I would rate it at ten out of ten. The product can scale to n-time scalability.

The technical support from Perception Point has improved significantly following the Fortinet acquisition. I would rate the technical support at nine out of ten.

Perception Point Advanced Email Security was recently acquired by Fortinet approximately one year ago.

The setup process for Perception Point Advanced Email Security is straightforward with no changes or improvements to the email security setup process. The setup complexity depends on the email platform being integrated. For Office 365, the integration takes approximately 15 minutes. For G Suite, the setup is more complex and requires approximately four to five hours due to G Suite's architecture rather than any limitation with Perception Point Advanced Email Security. Office 365 integration is fast and seamless by comparison.

The main competitors of Perception Point Advanced Email Security are Forcepoint and Check Point, as they compete effectively with Perception Point in the market, particularly regarding compliance capabilities. Forcepoint and Check Point both demonstrate strong technology. The competition between Check Point and Perception Point Advanced Email Security is highly competitive, with inch-by-inch competition occurring.

Perception Point Advanced Email Security specializes in email security, though it includes different products such as collaboration security and browser security. Customers are also seeking these additional capabilities. I am not recommending the browser security of Perception Point Advanced Email Security because it is not sufficiently matured and is still in development.

The only area for improvement is the integration capabilities with other solutions.

Perception Point Advanced Email Security is fully deployed on a cloud deployment model.

Regarding pricing, the cost-benefit depends on the customer's specific situation. However, in terms of cost savings, the GCC region has experienced significant financial fraud through email, with customers being targeted by ransom demands, scams, and money-related fraud. Customers can save substantial amounts through Perception Point Advanced Email Security. Additionally, the time the IT team invests in email filtration can be significantly reduced. If teams are manually managing email filtering or relying on default email filters from Office 365 or G Suite, they typically invest considerable time and effort in blocking unwanted emails or creating policies within the tenant. With Perception Point Advanced Email Security, the workload is reduced by approximately 60 to 80 percent.

Additional benefits include the reporting capabilities, which are excellent. Customers can enjoy other benefits such as customer support from Perception Point, now under Fortinet. Fortinet provides a substantial support infrastructure, resulting in improved support and services. Being associated with a well-known vendor under Fortinet has also improved the trustworthiness of Perception Point Advanced Email Security. My overall review rating for Perception Point Advanced Email Security is 8.5 out of 10.

Perception Point Advanced Email Security has helped me significantly in preventing phishing attacks, especially those delivered through URLs. Any URL-based phishing attack that comes through is being caught by this feature.

The features that I find most valuable in Perception Point Advanced Email Security include the account takeover attempt detection, which is worth mentioning. Recently, they introduced people posture and partner posture, which functions as a kind of SSPM, SaaS security posture management, especially for the users. For our users, we can identify any high-risk users or any account takeover items coming for our users, and those features are excellent and recently included in Perception Point Advanced Email Security.

The multi-layered threat detection is working well, and it is a very good feature. Multi-layered detection has introduced many algorithms, and it is being updated every day.

I believe the anti-phishing feature is also good, as it is utilizing phishing AI and ML technology combined with image recognition technology. It is working as expected.

I would like to improve reporting in Perception Point Advanced Email Security, along with adding options in the console where customers or users can create policies. That is what we are currently lacking; we need customized policies that we can create according to proofs of concept. If a customer is receiving cybersecurity advisory from any organization or their own company, it would be better if we could create an option to establish policies so that the AI and ML engine will work accordingly to those policies. Currently, they have the feature, but we need to request them in the backend, and they will be doing it for us from the backend. This process is difficult for us, as every time we want to make policy adjustments, we have to send them an email or get support. It is challenging sometimes for some customers when this type of advisory or policy change request occurs.

I would like to see custom reports as an additional feature in the future to make it better. Some customers might require customized reporting based on their requirements and priorities. Seamless integration with other security solutions is also something I recommend.

Third-party tools such as other XDR or SIEM tools or other MDR tools would benefit from seamless integration as well.

I have been working with Perception Point Advanced Email Security for more than three years.

I would rate their technical support as good, very good. Even though the acquisition happened, the support remains good until now, and I can rate it 4.5 out of five.

Positive

The initial setup for Perception Point Advanced Email Security is very straightforward and also very transparent. There is nothing happening behind the scenes; everything is visible, and we set it up while having control over it. Even when the system scans emails and all, we maintain control over Office 365 or G Suite, whatever email security or service provider that we are using.

I recommend that Perception Point Advanced Email Security is the best option in the market at the moment; however, we can say that Check Point and Proofpoint are competitors in the UAE market. They are also in competition with this, but feature-wise and detection rate-wise, Perception Point Advanced Email Security is ahead of these solutions.

I assess the effectiveness of Deep Content Disarm and Reconstruction technology as 4.5 out of five. FortiMail is now investing in Perception Point Advanced Email Security, and it is now under FortiMail Workspace Security. Fortinet is investing significantly in research and development, which is why new features are coming up. In terms of technology, Perception Point Advanced Email Security or FortiMail Workspace Security is top-notch in the industry. However, we cannot say it is a pure Fortinet family product because, based on the architecture, it is still a standalone product. We do not know about the future, but perhaps they will integrate it with Fortinet data centers, and then we can say it is a pure Fortinet family product. After the acquisition, they introduced FortiCloud integration into FortiMail Workspace Security, which is also a good feature for customers or users having Fortinet or FortiGate firewall and FortiCloud in their environment. With EDR, threat correlation can be seamlessly done from FortiCloud with ease.

The extensive reporting capabilities influence my decision-making process regarding email security as the reporting feature is intermediate. I believe there have been no changes in that part for the last couple of years, and there are no updates. Intermediate reports come in weekly, quarterly, and monthly, and we can schedule them. Automation is also included, as we can schedule the reports based on our requirements, and they will arrive in the inbox. They have introduced a graphical report, which is the one change that we can see in the reporting structure. However, there are no other types of reports or additional reports that exist in FortiMail Workspace Security.

In evaluating the success of sandboxing features in identifying threats in Fortinet, I find that they have two sandboxes in FortiMail Workspace Security. One is CPU, and the other is application, allowing for two levels of sandboxing. The metrics I use include application testing to see how effectively it detects or scans application-level malware or application-level executables. I also check for system-level executables such as EXE or MSI files, which can disrupt or modify system registry files or C-level programs. Perception Point Advanced Email Security shows very good results in that testing metric.

My experience with the pricing of Perception Point Advanced Email Security indicates that it is not costly, but actually a very decent price. With the features, functionalities, and detection capabilities that FortiMail Workspace Security provides, it is worth the investment. The need for human intervention is minimal. We have customers who have replaced Mimecast or other technology-based solutions with Perception Point Advanced Email Security or FortiMail Workspace Security, reporting that their challenges have reduced by approximately 95%. They no longer need to come to Perception Point Advanced Email Security every time to create policies or to check for false negatives or false positives. In Perception Point Advanced Email Security, it is very easy to manage, and that is the real feedback from the customers. I would rate this product 8.5 out of 10.

In the dealership group, we were running about 60,000 emails a month and we were finding that Perception Point Advanced Email Security was kicking back approximately 30 to 35% of those emails as either being spam, outright malicious, or POAs.

They run us through about seven layers of protection, and the reporting is excellent. I found it to be very effective.

It has a very high level of protection with Perception Point Advanced Email Security. They continually modernize their surveillance. They use a lot of AI. They run it through several layers of detection, deep packet inspection, which takes a lot of horsepower. I just think it is a good system.

Perception Point Advanced Email Security has helped address specific email threats within my organization. I get weekly reporting, and by doing that, I can go and talk to these people directly and make them aware of how many attacks they had and where the attacks are coming from and not only the source of the email, but what category of emails that they are receiving. With the combination of KnowBe4 PhishER, I think it is a good security process that we have in place.

Maybe a couple of improvements on their portal would be good, but other than that, I think it is good.

That is part of their service with Perception Point Advanced Email Security or what we pay for.

I use the detailed reporting feature with Perception Point Advanced Email Security every week. That's what I use to inform people because with a lot of this reporting, you'll find they tailor certain people within a company, upper managers, finance people, etcetera. Therefore, you keep them informed as to where their attacks are coming from. You'll see the attacks hitting numerous people within the dealership, and so you make them aware that email from here is malicious. Half the time they never see it because KnowBe4 filters it out or Perception Point Advanced Email Security does.

It is essential that Perception Point Advanced Email Security integrates with our existing infrastructure for me because it's part of our cybersecurity requirements for our cybersecurity insurance coverage. There are certain companies that are highly recognized within insurance companies that you should use, so Perception Point Advanced Email Security is one.

I think it's a good product as is, and I know they're continually improving their AI detection. I think as it is, Perception Point Advanced Email Security is a really good product. I'd recommend it to everybody.

For what it does, I think pricing for Perception Point Advanced Email Security is fair. You pay on a per-user basis, so I think the pricing is fair for what you get. You log into the portal, and you can do filtering, you can see who got hit with what, where the threats are coming from.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution a 10.

My main use case for Perception Point Advanced Email Security is proactive defense against advanced threats, particularly phishing, zero-day attacks, and malware that a standard filter might miss. I rely on the deep analysis capabilities to protect our users.

When we receive mail that contains a malicious attachment, the Perception Point Advanced Email Security analysis helps us significantly.

The best features Perception Point Advanced Email Security offers are its multi-layer dynamic scanning and anti-evasion technology.

The multi-layer dynamic scanning and activation technology have helped me significantly. When we receive a malicious email, the multi-layer dynamic scanning is an extra capability that Defender does not have, giving us better results in some cases.

Perception Point Advanced Email Security has positively impacted my organization by reducing risk, improving operational efficiency, and creating a better end-user experience.

Operational efficiency improves because the platform is highly effective and contains threats automatically, resulting in a very low false positive rate. Our security operation center team spends far less time on triage and manual investigation of routine email alerts. For a better end-user experience, users are less exposed to harmful emails, which leads to fewer incidents of clicking malicious links.

Perception Point Advanced Email Security can be improved by increasing the speed of analysis and delivery. In some cases, we have trouble with multi-factor authentication emails, which take more than a minute to be received. We need to make some changes in the analysis or the code becomes invalid. Additionally, the API documentation could be improved since when I tried to use the API, it was very difficult to find specific endpoints, and not all of the endpoints are public or on the website. I need to write a ticket to customer support to get the endpoint, so if they have it, I do not understand why it is not public.

I have been using Perception Point Advanced Email Security for almost two years.

Perception Point Advanced Email Security is stable approximately ninety-nine percent of the time. There may be some issues, but they are not significant, usually lasting just an hour or something similar.

There is no problem with Perception Point Advanced Email Security's scalability.

The customer support for Perception Point Advanced Email Security is very good. They help us a lot, and when we create a ticket, they answer us in one or two hours.

Positive

I previously used Defender, and I am still using Defender at the same time as Perception Point Advanced Email Security.

I am confident that there is a good return on investment with Perception Point Advanced Email Security. For example, in time saved, I am certain that it saves us a lot of time.

I estimate that my team saves approximately eight hours each week because of Perception Point Advanced Email Security.

Before choosing Perception Point Advanced Email Security, we had evaluated other options, specifically Trend Micro Email Security.

Perception Point Advanced Email Security is extremely user-friendly, and I would focus on the advanced threat capabilities because they are so advanced. It is not just a simple spam or malware filter; it deals with real-time sandboxing and anti-malware technology against current targeted threats, which is the difference between Perception Point Advanced Email Security and Defender. I rate Perception Point Advanced Email Security an eight on a scale of one to ten because it is very easy to use, and I prefer it. Compared to Defender, it is completely different. Perception Point Advanced Email Security offers just a few menus with a very simple interface, and that helps a lot. The customer support team is also very good, resolving our problems in just a few hours.

We're using Perception Point Advanced Email Security for several purposes. In one customer, we use it for disclaimers, VIP users, SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive personnel.

After integration, the tool is very easy to use. I had a problem with scripts for one customer, but my team did the integration for other customers without issues. So, I think I made a mistake in my integration. Both inline and API work fine.

The features that help detect threats in emails are easy to use. For example, finding out if emails are spam or malicious is simple in security operations. If they're not spam, it's easy to refresh the customer database. The detection and response capabilities are very good, especially for zero-day threats.

To improve the solution, maybe a portal for end users to consult their emails would be helpful. The end user could access the portal and see their emails or events. They could also refresh the names.

We've scaled from 10 to 100 users without any problems. Four customers currently use the solution, and they're all satisfied with the results.

The deployment process is very easy. The documentation is helpful and clear for deployment and configuration. We don't need a lot of resources or people for maintenance. All our clients are in the public cloud.

The return on investment is good because the cost isn't expensive, and it works well with Microsoft.

In Brazil, the dollar price affects the cost. Perception Point Advanced Email Security is about 50 percent less expensive.

The solution is very easy to use. We don't have any difficulty with transactions. Finding information, customizing configurations, and getting support or documentation is simple. I don't have any negative points to mention. I would recommend this solution to others. On a scale of one to ten, I'd give it a ten.

It's amazing for us—the protection, the analysis time compared to Microsoft 365, and the pricing are all good. We're using both solutions—spam and protection channels. Recently, we presented two-week results to a customer, and they liked them and wanted to buy the solution. Our feedback is positive. 

We're developing a strategy to increase sales of the solution. When we deliver executive summaries to customers, we present good news about our company and discuss how Perception Point Advanced Email Security can help improve their security.

Positive

I use Perception Point Advanced Email Security for the protection of my emails.

I like the fact that Perception Point Advanced Email Security possesses the knowledge and the visibility to figure out what exactly my problems are or what kind of attacks or threats I face. It is a super easy tool that offers me a very easy console to use since it helps me to have a better clarity and understanding of the product.

Dashboard is an area of concern in the solution where improvements are required. The solution also needs to consider adding DMARC to the tool and providing phishing awareness training since such initiatives can be helpful for users. Usually, I need to opt for a solution to get DMARC and receive phishing awareness training since the aforementioned aspects are not available in Perception Point Advanced Email Security.

I have been using Perception Point Advanced Email Security for three years. I use the solution's latest version since it is an area where the product makes continuous improvements. My company basically functions as a solution provider.

It is a stable solution.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

My company deals with around 40 to 45 users of the solution, and we offer protection to around 7,000 to 8,000 email inboxes with the help of Perception Point Advanced Email Security.

I have contacted the solution's technical support.

My company's clients were using some other solutions like Mimecast, IRONSCALES, and Proofpoint in the past, but my company later managed to replace them all with Perception Point Advanced Email Security.

The product's initial setup was straightforward and can be done in 30 to 45 minutes.

Currently, my company helps others to deploy the product and their environments.

The solution is deployed on the cloud and on an on-premises model.

My company did seek the help of an integrator during the deployment process of the product.

Perception Point Advanced Email Security offers an option to its users to make either monthly or yearly payments. The exact amount a user has to pay to Perception Point Advanced Email Security depends on the number of email inboxes protected by the product. If a user only wants protection for email, then the price of the product is okay, but if they opt for the collaboration options offered by the product, then it becomes a little expensive.

To those who plan to use Perception Point Advanced Email Security in the future, I would like to say that it is all about selecting an appropriate partner with the right side of knowledge to help you deal with your issues and help you with the support part whenever required.

I rate the overall product a ten out of ten.

There are multiple use cases. There are those who are facing big-time, sophisticated attacks through emails. Those who are looking for not only email security but also security for other cloud collaboration channels. Both scenarios. We sold the Perception Point.

One is the hardware-assisted platform that provides more insight into the threat scenarios. And the other is their instant response team's availability, 24/7, for identifying and responding to incidents. These are the two main things that everyone likes.

There is room for improvement in terms of adding the DLP (Data Loss Prevention) solution, which would be a good option for Perception Point to look into.

In future releases, additional features that our clients would like to see included in the next release of Perception Point are Phishing Link Protection (PLP) and security awareness training. Security awareness training used to come along with email security solutions.

I have been selling this solution for two and a half years. We currently offer the latest version with web security. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. There have been no restrictions till now. We didn't face any issues.

We have around 50 clients. They are a mix of small, medium, and enterprise businesses.

The customer service and support are okay. We didn't face any problems.

Positive

The initial setup is super easy because, from the last year's end, I didn't even miss any renewals. All the clients renewed. So, ten out of ten. I would rate it a ten on ten, where one being difficult and ten being easy. 

The solution is deployed both on the cloud and on-premises. 

However, most of our clients have deployed the solution on the public cloud and either use G-Suite or Microsoft 365 as the cloud provider. 

If it's a straightforward deployment, around 15 to 20 minutes, or a maximum of 40 minutes with all configurations and training. There are multiple ways. If we do it within 15 minutes, that's for basic configurations. If there are extra configurations required for the client, it could reach 30 to 45 minutes.

ur deployment process is API-based and in-line mode. The basic 90% is in-line mode.

I would rate the pricing model a five out of ten, where one being cheap and ten being expensive. 

The solution is neither cheap nor expensive. There are no additional costs to the standard license. 

I would suggest believing in the solution's technology and believing in the right partners who are supporting the implementation of the solution.

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

We route all of our inbound emails through Perception Point to have it scan for malicious files, malicious URLs, spam—all the attack vectors that can be used via email. 

We're also using it as a sandbox, which is a new feature we started to use in the last two quarters. We use their API to send files and URLs for investigation to the Perception Point sandbox. Based on the verdict, we take action. If it's clean we keep it in the system, and if it's malicious we delete it from our system.

Perception Point has helped to reduce our false positive rate by a very good percentage, on the order of 80 percent. It has also absolutely helped to reduce the number of alerts received, by something like 95 percent. As a result, we have to manage fewer incidents due to emails containing malicious files. If the EDR is detecting it, you need to investigate it and, in some cases, to isolate the device and reimage the device. In terms of our operations, it has reduced the workload by a lot.

Almost everything is a valuable feature. Among the most important are the sandboxing and the levels of pattern and sophisticated techniques they are able to detect. As far as I know, and I've worked with another product before, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, other products are not able to detect those kinds of malicious files or URLs. Perception Point is our second layer, and it always catches them. 

Another feature that we really like, one that was introduced a few months back, is the way it categorizes threats into groups, such as Emotet, Qbot, Formbook, and the like. It's not only telling you that something is malware, but it's also giving you insight into what kind of malware, which category tried to exploit you. For a security team, this kind of information is very critical because it's a type of intelligence. You understand what you are facing and whether you are a target for a specific group of threats, and you can defend better against them.

And something that has really improved in the last few months is the Incident Response team, which comes as part of the service. The SLA is really amazing. This was the biggest advantage. When you are working with MDO or Proofpoint, for example, you will never speak to a human. You can open a case and they will reply, but we have a Slack channel with Perception Point. We can reach out to them and they answer immediately, meaning within five and 30 minutes. For us, that's like real-time when working with a vendor.

The main goal of the Incident Response team is responding to incidents, of course. But the way we use them is that when we identify a false positive, we ask them, "Hey guys, can you check why we got this false positive?" They do a great job checking and fine-tuning as a result, so that the next time it will pass through. The same goes for a true positive. What is unique about the product is that, in the end, it's not only a machine, rather there is also human interaction. A human will sometimes go over the tagging and decide that the system gave the wrong verdict. This is how they make sure that the system gets better and better all the time. In the backend, they have machine learning. But to optimize the model, somebody has to fine-tune it all the time. You cannot expect that the first model will be bulletproof, and that is the way they are doing it. That is why they are so good in this domain.

We have some unique use cases that we're working on with them, like integrating their solution with Zendesk and with Shodan.

In terms of architecture, and I know that they're going to improve this, the solution needs to be much more redundant. There was an outage a month ago in AWS, and that basically stopped the service for two or three hours. Although in two years, this was the first time that something like that happened, our expectation from a company like Perception Point is that it should work with either a multi-cloud or multi-region architecture, to improve the resilience. Perception Point can find a better way to maintain availability. In this case, the AWS problem was in North America, so if Perception Point had had a region in Europe, they probably would have been able to recover much more quickly, just flip it, and that would have been it.

I've been using Perception Point Advanced Email Security for two years.

Everything has worked as expected. It's working 99.999 percent of the time.

We get 50,000 to 100,000 emails per day and we haven't faced any scalability issues. I can't say there was a delay in emails because of this volume.

We aren't using the solution’s expanded product portfolio to protect more than just email, at this stage, but we are looking into it for the coming year.

We are also working with them with requirements from our end and we are really looking forward to a native integration with Zendesk. We believe that both companies, Zendesk and Perception Point, can benefit from that, and not just our company. Once Perception Point has an integration with Zendesk, it will impact many customers around the world in a positive way.

We haven't needed to use customer support so far.

We used FortiMail before, but it's not a next-generation email gateway.

Our initial deployment of Perception Point had some complexity, because when I started with my current company, we had on-prem Exchange and FortiMail. That made it a bit challenging. It was less an issue with Perception Point and more because of our architecture.

Once we moved to Office 365, it took two minutes. For an Office 365 customer, it's a very easy deployment.

The pricing is not cheap, but I can see the value. In security, if you are trying to save by giving up quality, that's a very bad decision. If there is high quality and it demands a high cost, you need to pay. Don't compromise on quality. If Perception Point is 99 percent accurate, and Proofpoint is 97 percent accurate but costs 20 percent less, I'll pay the extra 20 percent and sleep well at night.

We were thinking about Proofpoint. The big advantage of Perception Point is the Incident Response service. There is no product in the market that provides that kind of service. Also, although they were small when we started with them two years ago, we believed in the company and its vision. And it has proven itself. We have seen the outcome. Microsoft is 100 or 1,000 times bigger than Perception Point, but Microsoft misses so many threats that Perception Point catches. When it comes to advanced malware, there is a 20 percent difference, and that's a huge number.

If you are looking for the next generation of email gateway with an Incident Response service, select Perception Point without any second thoughts.

A few months back, I would definitely have said that the Incident Response service needed improvement, in terms of their responses and SLA, but because they really took the required action, I can't think of anything else that they should improve. I am really happy with what I have. If they maintain it, I will be a very happy customer.

We use it to scan email for security purposes. 

It's all cloud, there is no on-premise footprint. All the infrastructure is Perception Point infrastructure.

Judging the effectiveness of Perception Point when it comes to detection is difficult because we do not have only Perception Point in our email security flow. Perception Point is the last line of defense in our protection process, what we call a third-tier of protection. Before Perception Point, we have two layers of Microsoft in place, and those two layers filter quite a lot. We wanted to add another layer from a different vendor so that we were not only relying on Microsoft, but also because we knew Microsoft was not catching everything. That was proven through our PoC with Perception Point. Every month we catch a good number of malicious emails. Our focus is more on malicious messages than on spam, although it catches a good number of spam messages as well.

We escalate one or two emails per month that were not discovered by either Perception Point or Microsoft, so our overall effectiveness is pretty good. But Perception Point is certainly catching things that Microsoft does not catch. It is doing important work because an email that Microsoft does not catch is a risk if it gets into a user's mailbox. We are talking about 25,000 to 30,000 emails a month that Perception Point is catching that Microsoft is not yet detecting.

Also, Perception Point's Incident Response team is like an extension of our messaging team in the sense that we do not have the capacity or the resources to evaluate whether an email is malicious or not, especially for the type of volume we have. This was one of the key criteria for us when selecting a partner. With Microsoft, a lot of it is done by machine learning, but we do not have a Microsoft team making a determination about emails or a team that we can easily escalate issues to or turn to for an email security conversation. Perception Point performs a really important part of what our vision is for email security.

We have also created an integration where users are able to report phishing attempts, and those emails are scrutinized by the Perception Point Incident Response team. That is an additional benefit. They're adding value both through qualifying our emails and through reviewing messages that our users report as phishing attempts.

We have another integration between Perception Point and our endpoint solution. That is something Perception Point actually offered so that if the endpoint solution finds something where the entry point was an email, there is an automatic interaction through which Perception Point does a review and removes things from the email box. That is an added benefit.

The most valuable features of the solution are the ones that are related to finding impersonation attacks and detecting attempts to steal credentials. In scenarios where attackers get you to follow URLs to a malicious site that looks similar to a good site, and then ask for the user credentials to try to steal them, it is very useful.

It also has features for detecting branding impersonation.

And specifically, when it comes to protecting our VIPs and avoiding BEC (business email compromise) attacks, that is another important part for us.

It scans pretty much all content, so it's full-scale. We see in our dashboard how emails are categorized by different engines. There isn't just one engine that determines whether an email is malicious. They have a multi-engine architecture for detection of malicious emails. They provide full scanning of email.

There is still room for improvement with BEC. There is more work to be done by Perception Point on machine learning and neuro language as well. BEC is very difficult if you don't have a computer language looking into the content of the email and trying to make a determination through that. With BEC you often don't have an attachment or a URL. That is an area where there is certainly room for improvement.

We have been using Perception Point Advanced Email Security in production since August of this year, so more than four months. Before that, we ran a PoC and we were in pilot mode for about another six months.

We have not had any issues with the stability in production. We had some small issues during the PoC, but they did not have an impact on us because we were just in monitoring mode. And regarding the issue with Amazon this week, we were not affected, because it was in the US and we were not using the infrastructure in the US.

We haven't seen any issues with emails failing because they are delayed or in queue. We haven't been aware of a situation where users are waiting for an email. To a certain extent, it's because we are not running inline so Perception Point cannot be a bottleneck because the users have the emails in their mailboxes. A customer that runs the solution inline may have a different opinion because email will not arrive until Perception Point has processed it.

Perception Point's team in general, whether it's the support people, the management, or the sales folks that were engaged with us, have been very good. Often, when a company is at the PoC stage, they engage with you and try to demonstrate that they're good, but once you have signed a contract that might fade away. That has not been the case with Perception Point. They are very responsive and very attentive to our requests. The support has been very good.

Positive

The initial setup was in between a straightforward and a complex process. We had some hurdles at the beginning because of some issues with AWS.

Also, the way we have rolled out the solution is different from the way Perception Point normally rolls it out for its customers. In general, it is known as an inline solution, where the traffic is scanned by sending it to Perception Point, and then they send it back to the customer before it reaches the users' mailboxes. But we did not set it up that way. We rolled out in another way that became available during the pilot phase. We decided to go for that option because we felt it was less risky when it comes to the email flow. If something were to happen to Perception Point or to Amazon, like happened to Amazon a few days ago, then the email flow would be affected and require us to take action.

The way that we rolled it out is similar to what the competitors do. The email arrives into the user's mailbox and is then scanned. It then takes any necessary actions in seconds or minutes. I don't know how much Perception Point is advertising this. We were the only customer that was testing this option and then decided to go to production with it.

From a protection point of view, the inline method, which is the preferred mode, is obviously more secure, because emails will not get to the end-users until they have been scanned. In our case, end-users are receiving the emails and, in parallel, they are being analyzed. If action is required, Perception Point will take the email out from the end-user's mailboxes. There is a small period of time where the user could click on an email that is malicious. But we made the decision to roll it out in this way.

We did the rollout in phases over three weeks in the month of July. We first rolled it out to our users in Asia-Pacific, and then to our users in America, and then our users in EMEA.

In terms of time-to-value, the solution was already delivering value during the PoC. The difference was that in the PoC, the solution was just alerting us and was not taking action. However, we had an agreement with Perception Point that if we knew with certainty that emails were malicious by code, they would remove them even during the PoC. When we moved to production, Perception Point was immediately taking action.

Another difference in our rollout was that we started with a goal of avoiding a lot of false positives, using an 80 percent accuracy level for the determination of maliciousness. That meant that if the algorithms thought that there was an 80 percent chance, or above, that an email was malicious, action was taken to remove it from the user's mailbox. We started to see that happen from the very first moment we went live. The value was there from the beginning.

After months of working in production with this 80-percent-and-above threshold, we changed in November to 60 percent. In the November numbers, we see a decrease in reports from our users of phishing emails. We still have to see if this remains the case during December and January. But this could be an indication of Perception Point now catching more, before users are required to report something as phishing.

I believe we have seen ROI. We are catching emails, important emails to our VIPs. We run reports facilitated by Perception Point on the numbers, but they also provide summaries that we highlight at the end of every month about emails attacking VIPs or impersonating VIPs. We can see that if an email had not been caught it could have been really malicious. From that point of view, the return on investment is there. Even one email that gets through is already one too many, but there is no 100 percent solution. When we see that, on top of Microsoft, Perception Point is catching 25,000 to 30,000 emails, that is a good number for us. As a percentage of the volume of email that we receive overall, those numbers are small, but they're quite big if we understand that there are 30,000 emails with potentially malicious implications for our users and our company.

We ran an RFI with different solutions, but we only did a PoC with Perception Point and another competitor.

One of the main attractions for us with Perception Point was the Incident Response team. Perception Point was one of the few companies that offered that feature and it fulfilled something that we did not have: the expertise and the capacity to look into emails. The other vendors that did offer something similar charged additional money for it.

The other piece was the inline versus post-delivery issue. We actually liked the idea of inline, but our management was attracted more to the idea of the post-delivery. Perception Point gave us the flexibility to do one or the other and that also was important to us.

In addition, the company and the individuals who engaged with us at Perception Point were very good in terms of listening to us and our requests, and in many cases, implementing them very quickly. Before we had even signed, they were already giving us solutions to some of our requests. That reaction, listening to our feedback and implementing it, continues now. We checked with some Perception Point customer references and they said that type of responsiveness won't change after you sign, and that has been our experience as well. We are still in contact regularly, discussing ideas and improvements with them.

Obviously, you need to be convinced about a solution on the technical side and see good results out of a PoC, but the service and the people behind it were part of what made us go with Perception Point.

Whether you're looking at Perception Point or any other solution, the first thing to do is to find the weak areas with your current solution. Some solutions may be more targeted to a specific technology or type of threat. There are solutions that are very specialized in BEC, for example, and they're very good at BEC. So if your problem is with BEC, then maybe focus on them. Knowing your main problem will help in determining which solution to go with. Otherwise, you could be picking something that is not going to resolve your problem.