Why Choose IRONSCALES over Cisco Secure Email (IronPort)

Choosing the right email and messaging security platform is foundational to the protection of your organization. This page compares IRONSCALES and Cisco Secure Email Gateway (IronPort) to help you choose the platform that is right for you.
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IRONSCALES provides a self-learning, AI-driven email security platform that continuously detects and remediates advanced threats like BEC, credential harvesting, ATO, and more, in milliseconds. The platform also incorporates employees into the organization’s fight against phishing with integrated email alert banners, report buttons, personalized phishing simulation testing, and advanced security awareness training (SAT).
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Cisco Secure Email Gateway traces back to IronPort, one of the longest-running names in email security. Backed by Cisco Talos threat intelligence, AMP, and Threat Grid sandboxing, its gateway heritage is strong at filtering spam and known malware. Cisco has since added an API-based product, Secure Email Threat Defense, for Microsoft 365.

The Gap Legacy SEGs Can't Close

Cisco Secure Email grew up as the IronPort gateway, built for a threat landscape where phishing meant bad grammar, suspicious links, and spoofed domains. Attacks now look nothing like that. AI-generated messages are grammatically flawless. Social engineering targets specific employees with context scraped from LinkedIn and company websites.

Gateway-based detection was not built for this. It does not recognize subtle signs of malicious intent. It cannot see what happens after delivery, cannot learn from user reports in real time, and cannot adapt to attacks that evolve mid-campaign.

Cisco (IronPort) gateways miss 51.6 phishing attacks per 100 mailboxes every month.

 

That is not a guess. It is what we measured across 1,921 customer environments that layer IRONSCALES with their existing SEG.

See what that looks like for your org.

SEG Vendor
Mailboxes
—
Attacks missed by Mimecast
over 30-days for your org size.

Is This Legit?

You're probably wondering, "Is this real, or just vendor hyperbole?" Yeah, it's real, it's built on data from 1,921 customers who use IRONSCALES to catch what their SEGs miss. See the proof here.

Attacks by Category

Select mailbox count to see breakdown

 
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How IRONSCALES Delivers Smarter Protection 

No MX Record Changes, Easy Deployment

Unlike a gateway deployment, IRONSCALES integrates with your Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and other platforms via API, removing the need for MX record changes. Get up and running in minutes with minimal IT involvement.

 

Threat Intelligence Approaches

❌ Cisco relies on Talos threat intelligence, AMP, and Threat Grid sandboxing, focused on pre-delivery analysis of content and reputation. That heritage is strong against spam and known malware, and weaker against payload-free social engineering like vendor scams and credential theft.

 

✔ IRONSCALES employs Adaptive AI combined with human intelligence to detect threats both pre- and post-delivery. This mailbox-level anomaly detection allows for real-time identification and remediation of sophisticated attacks.

 

Scalability & Administrative Overhead

❌ Cisco Secure Email centers on the gateway and the Cisco Enterprise Agreement. Reviewers describe the gateway back end as complex, with rule sets that are hard to untangle and a false-positive learning period, which adds administrative overhead.

 

✔ IRONSCALES offers a scalable solution suitable for organizations of all sizes, with an emphasis on automation and user-friendly interfaces. This design reduces the need for extensive administrative oversight, making it accessible even to teams with limited security personnel.

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Why IRONSCALES?

Our platform protects your employee's inboxes from advanced phishing attacks that others miss, with the only technology that combines AI and human insights. Our platform is quick to deploy and  dead simple to manage (so you get instant protection).

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Advanced Threat Protection

Protect Better
Block advanced phishing and BEC attacks (and never seen before threats) with our Adaptive AI—dynamically sharpened by real-world user insights and a community of over 36,000 threat hunters.
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SOC Automation

Simplify Operations

Slash the time your team spends remediating email incidents from 30 minutes per incident to 30 seconds.

Our Adaptive AI scans every email for malicious indicators. When it finds a threat, it doesn’t just block it, it automatically finds and remediates all others like it in your environment.

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HUMAN RISK MANAGEMENT

Empower your Org

Triple the email security awareness of your workforce and transform your employees into a crucial line of phishing defense. We make it dead simple to sharpen your employees' understanding of real-world threats with:

  • Phishing simulation testing
  • Security awareness training (SAT)
  • Dynamic email banners

...and a GPT-powered chat assistant

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Case Studies

"The ability to provide real-time feedback on both positive and negative performance has proven very effective. It’s a wake-up call for our employees.”
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