Advanced phishing defense has improved email protection and consistently reduced security workload
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) is primarily to secure the email gateway for Microsoft 365 or Exchange Online, and it is also used for phishing and BEC protection. Additionally, it allows us advanced threat protection such as sandboxing attachments, URL protection, and centralized multi-tenant management.
I mainly use Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) for email security, such as inbound and outbound SMTP filtering, anti-phishing, ATP sandboxing, URL time-of-check protection, and email continuity. Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) is also employed for email security, archiving, continuity, and basic encryption.
Additional considerations include that it acts as a compensating control over native Office 365. It has also reduced our SOC overload via pre-filtering and policy enforcement.
What is most valuable?
The best features of Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) include advanced threat protection (ATP), anti-phishing with targeted attack heuristics, and impersonation detection such as display name and domain similarities. Top features also include URL defense, URL rewriting, time-of-click verification, blocking malicious links in delivered mail, and spam and reputation filtering that helps us to real-time block list content crawling.
The feature I find myself relying on the most is anti-phishing and impersonation protection because phishing is the highest incident volume across the tenants, leading to direct financial and reputational risk exposure. This feature significantly reduces P1 security escalations, delivering measurable risk reduction, SLA stability, and operational efficiency across multi-tenant environments.
An additional standout feature is the sandbox detonation of attachments, which detects zero-day unknown malware, along with behavioral analytics. The value it provides to our organization includes preventing payload delivery, reducing endpoint incidents, and lowering SOC and remediation overload. The key strength it gives us is layered filtration.
Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) has had a positive impact on our organization, including a reduction in phishing, fewer P1 security escalations, a lower volume of user-reported spam, an improved email authentication posture, and a reduction in SOC triage workload.
The observed outcomes from these improvements show a reduction in successful phishing incidents post-tuning of about thirty to fifty percent. I have also seen a seventy to eighty percent spam catch rate improvement over the native baseline filtering and a drop of thirty to forty percent in user-reported phishing tickets, as well as a major reduction of about twenty to thirty-five percent in SOC email-related triage workload. The operational impact includes improved MTTD, reduced false positives after policy optimization, and stronger DMARC enforcement compliance.
What needs improvement?
The improvement area for Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) would be reducing false positives via imported ML transparency and securing logic, along with faster log search and policy sync performance enhancements. Additionally, a stronger API or SIEM integration for automation and SOC workflows would be beneficial.
Additional challenges related to improvements include impersonation tuning complexity, which requires continuous policy refinement, and the false positive management overhead in high-security tenants. There is a need for stronger automation, role-based access control granularity, and advanced threat visibility for multi-tenant environments.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) for two or more years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) is stable in my experience, as there has been no downtime since it has been deployed.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) is scalable. We first deployed it for one line of business (LOB) and then for multiple LOBs, all while maintaining stability without any lag.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support for Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) is good, and the documentation is also very helpful.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, we were not using an email gateway solution; we only utilized native Microsoft 365 EOP or Defender for Office 365. The reason for switching to Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) was its higher phishing bypass rate, limited impersonation protection granularity, and less visibility in message tracing and threat logs. Our decision was driven by the need for a dedicated security layer with stronger phishing control, sandboxing, and centralized policy governance across multiple customer tenants.
How was the initial setup?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the licensing is flexible but needs proper feature scoping to avoid over-licensing. The setup cost primarily involves services rather than the product.
What about the implementation team?
I purchased Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) through the AWS Marketplace.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment, with an incident reduction of about forty to sixty percent drop in successful phishing. The efficiency of the SOC team has increased because the email-related triage workload has been reduced by twenty to thirty-five percent. Additionally, there is reduced endpoint remediation cost, with less reimaging or incident response hours, and operational stability has been quite high as the continuity has avoided mail outage impacts, which is useful for avoiding business downtime penalties.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials), I evaluated one other option, which was Trend Micro Email Security.
I chose Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) due to its better MSP multi-tenant manageability, competitive total cost of ownership (TCO), and bundling flexibility.
What other advice do I have?
The advice I would give to others looking into using Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (Barracuda Essentials) is to do a proper baseline assessment of the current phishing rate and mail flow design. I would also suggest enabling ATP and URL protection by default, tuning policies per risk tier, and integrating logs with SIEM for centralized monitoring. I would rate this product an eight out of ten.
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?
User-Friendly Software That Helps Protect Our Environment
What do you like best about the product?
The software is user friendly, and does a great job at protecting our environment.
What do you dislike about the product?
At times, emails we’ve already whitelisted still end up getting blocked. When that happens, we have to dig into the cause and adjust the right settings so it doesn’t keep happening.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Email security! It’s honestly amazing, day to day, how many emails we receive compared with how many get blocked. Simply keeping phishing emails out is a huge win in my book.
Email Gateway Defense: Blocking Threats, Securing Inboxes
What do you like best about the product?
The most helpful thing about this tool is the ease of use. It helps me to quickly investigate and remediate phishing emails. If a legitimate email is blocked, EGF includes features to quickly mark as a false positive and allow the sender. This is used in collaboration with MS Defender and acts as our first line of defense for correspondence. I use the product on a daily basis, as email communication is a huge part in our company.
What do you dislike about the product?
There is not a lot to dislike of this product. I would say that maybe combining some of the tools together in one interface, which they are working on.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Barracuda gives me a visual of emails that flow in and out of our environment. This is not something that, say, Exchange Admin can do.
Great tool for spam management
What do you like best about the product?
The advanced threat protection works very well and we find it super valuable when managing the spam and fishing emails that come through.
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometimes, it can catch a decent amount of emails that are not spam.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Stopping phishing attacks, blocking impersonation attacks. Reducing risks of users falling for impersonation attempts.
Solid Tool for Email Protection
What do you like best about the product?
The amount of flexibility that is offered with the tool to keep your Email environment safe from phishing, spam, etc... is awesome and really lets our team keep our hands off of the admin portal for as long as necessary.
What do you dislike about the product?
The dashboard itself is a little odd, even the new version, hoping they amp it up a little bit.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Solving directed attacks at our environment by blocking malicious emails and also quarantining junk/spam emails for our users.
Good product for the price
What do you like best about the product?
Was an easy setup process and being in the cloud it got me off my on prem Barracuda device.
What do you dislike about the product?
Does not support Google authentication to let users in to manage their quarantine and spam.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It stops most of the spam and threat actor emails.
