What Is the Best MX Logic McAfee SAAS Replacement?

 

McAfee SaaS was our favorite Spam Filtering service but Intel purchased them and the bureaucratic, short-sighted, over-payed CEO’s took over and decided to scrap the service.  Why would they do that, you may ask?

I spoke with a rep who had recently left the company and he informed me that the higher-ups at Intel decided that since McAfee SAAS wasn’t one of the top 2 Saas providers for the Fortune 500 they we’re going to shut their doors.

So the company that was 3^rd, had arguable a better product and who’s support team I actually found knowledgeable (which is extremely rare for most tech companies) decided to close its doors rather than increase sales, make a push for the top 2 and subsequently fired everyone and dumped the product.

Nice work Intel, you got some sharp minds running the show.

So, like many others I’m sure, I had to go through the process of Googling, networking and testing different solutions and figured I would share my findings on the top 3 SaaS’ solutions (in no particular order as you’ll soon see)

Mimecast

Mimecast seemed to be the most commonly recommended solution on forums like Spiceworks and Reddit but from start to finish I was unhappy w/ Mimecast.  Becoming a partner took constant emailing and following up.

I got a lot of “sorry, I missed this email”, “I was on vacation” or “didn’t I already send you that”.  Becoming a partner is one time deal so okay, that part was bad but how was the service itself.

Well a lot of the management functions require you to make requests through your tech rep, which is very annoying. I had to have him setup the inbound IP addresses, he had to verify my firewall rules, he had to add the clients to my portal and when it came time to getting help with their portal he kept asking, “did you watch the training videos?”.

I watched some of them yes, but I just want to call and get the answer to a simple question.  I don’t want to watch a 30 minute video that may or may not even cover what it is that I need.  There were other obnoxious aspects to their service but I will leave my analysis of their staff as “un-accommodating clown shoes”.

Not only was the staff weak but their knowledgebase is a joke.  Worse than all of that is the portal, talk about a learning curve.  Simple things like Quarantine reports and adding users are buried in strangely named parent categories like (Digest Sets and Inbound Directories).

I don’t know who designed the portal but i picture a scenario where everybody hated it and no one said anything because the guy in charge was an asshole.

So, if you liked McAfee’s portal, be prepared to not like Mimecast’s.  The end user experience was also poor as they try to force all of the spam tweaking to be done through their Outlook plugin, if you don’t use that GOOD LUCK because they have no good secondary options; if you have a phone or OWA user, too bad.

As someone who uses a lot of SAAS and Partner services A LOT, this was one of the worst experiences I can remember.  The reps were a large part of the problem but the Mimecast portal is very confusing and their pricing is way higher than their more suitable counterparts.

EveryCloud

You’ll notice this section is much shorter than Mimecast’s because unlike the useless staff at Mimecast, Everycloud has tremendous customer support. I like complaining so for me to not complain says a lot.

EveryCloud gets you signed up nice and easy and lets you do any and all management without the interference of a dimwitted tech rep.  My sales rep was nice and I only really have had to deal with them once or twice to get everything purchased and setup.

The portal looks rather dated but everything in it is easy to find and understandable. The major annoyance with the portal is that it’s Flash.  That means no accessing from phones,  password tools like Dashlane wont work and an overall load times are a bit slow. It works but it needs a facelift

As for the config, I got LDAP setup with ease and was able to easily add/manage users, aliases and domains.  Running message audits is similar to McAfee and so is a lot of the list administration. There is no URL click protect like Mimecast, McAfee or Proofpoint so that was a bit of a negative.  They have a nice Outlook add-in and their quarantine report that was very McAfee-esque so a lot of clients barely noticed the transition.

The price is almost half that of Mimecast, they have a much cleaner user and partner experience and if you need support they have a chat box on their home page that gets you connected to someone knowledgeable in seconds.  Also, the owner must be on Spiceworks all the time because every time a client made a complained on the website, they got a call back instantly. 

Proofpoint/Spambrella

Proofpoint was the designated partner for the McAfee transition and because of that they have a built in migration tool that will transfer everything from McAfee to Proofpoint.  I did not test this feature but it did seem to be a major selling point for those with years’ worth of whitelists and blacklists.  I also found my reps to be capable and on top of things and they seemed eager for the business.

One strange aspect of the experience was that when I tested Spambrella, another SaaS I was pointed to, I found out that it was actually just a repacking of Proofpoint.

Somehow Spambrella sells more licenses that Proofpoint so purchasing Proofpoint through Spambrella was actually the cheaper option even though Proofpoint is the parent product (yeah, it took me a minute to process this too).  It’s odd but ultimately not a deterrent.

So once we got Spambrella setup I found the portal to look a little dated but functioned fairly well.  It is laid out and designed a little backwards but has all the key functions and you would need if you we’re coming from McAfee.  Their pricing is in EveryCloud range and is much lower than Mimecast so if your going off of price, they’re competitive.

They have no Outlook plugin for managing spam, which is a large negative and was the ultimate reason why we didn’t choose their product. Their portal could use a refresh but ultimately their services were solid and seeing as they are the dedicated migration partner of McAfee, they offer a lot of upside for those looking to make a simple transition.

 

So, drumroll please…

Our choice for McAfee replacement is definitely EveryCloud.  They do have a little brother feel to Mimecast and some of the other Fortune 500 favorites but as an MSP focused on SMBs, it fit our client base perfectly.  We have been using it for several months now and have no major complaints to share.

 

 

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