The ePrism Email Security appliance from EdgeWave offers email security features such as inbound and outbound content filtering and email policy enforcement, anti-spam and anti-virus. This appliance features solid protection from malicious email threats, including denial-of-service attacks at the perimeter, and its Zero Minute Defense filter can identify emerging threats immediately and then create protection rules on the fly to block malicious or harmful email.
We had little trouble with the initial setup of the appliance, but we found the configuration to be slightly difficult. The initial setup is done by connecting the appliance to the network and then using a browser to access the initial setup wizard. This wizard contained clear steps and we were through it in just a few minutes. After the setup wizard was complete, we were taken to the web-based administration console. This is where we started to run into some confusion. Overall, we found this appliance to be slightly daunting to configure as we had to spend quite a bit of time getting comfortable navigating the management console and configuring the product.
With that said, this solution does feature some excellent policy and configuration options. Administrators can configure content filters and email policies that protect sensitive data from leaving the enterprise unprotected. Through the onboard data leakage prevention and encryption modules, if a message is found to contain sensitive data, rules can be put in place to require the message be encrypted before leaving the enterprise. Also, we found this solution to contain a good amount of predefined regulatory compliance filtering policies ready to go right out of the box. Adding to the overall flexibility are its deployment options. It can be deployed as an onsite appliance or hosted as a SaaS offering.
Documentation included a getting-started guide along with an administrator guide and a few other pieces of supplemental manuals. The getting-started guide provided a good amount of detail to get the appliance up and running in the environment with a basic configuration. The administrator guide provided a good overview of configuring the appliance and its features. We found all documentation to contain a reasonable amount of screen shots and configuration examples along with clear, step-by-step instructions.
EdgeWave offers full 24/7 phone- and email-based technical support to customers as part of the ongoing subscription price. On top of phone and email assistance, customers can also access a large support area on the vendor website that includes many resources, such as a knowledge base, documentation downloads and video tours.
At a price starting at a one-time cost of $1,500 for the appliance itself, plus an ongoing subscription cost of $12 per mailbox per year, we found this to be a good value for the money. While the subscription-based model can be pricey on an ongoing basis, we found this product includes some excellent capabilities due to its hosted deployment model. EdgeWave's ePrism Email Security is an overall good value once it is properly configured and running in the environment.
