XCS Features

Compare the WatchGuard XCS (Extensible Content Security) Solutions against competitors including Barracuda, Ironport, Websense, Proofpoint and Cisco. WatchGuard XCS Products

WatchGuard XCS 170, 370 and 570 appliances have been specifically designed for small to medium businesses to protect from email threats and prevent outbound data loss at an affordable price.

These appliance models are built on the same enterprise class email threat prevention of the higher end XCS enterprise models and include the WatchGuard XCS defense‐in‐depth protection built on its proprietary 15+ year proven technology.
Installation and management of XCS appliances is simple and intuitive featuring a web‐based GUI. Administrators or small business owners simply set it and forget it.

WG XCS 170, 370 and 570 models offer multiple layers of redundancy, including:

Message level redundancy so you never lose a message patented queue replication capabilities
Clustering with the ability to replicate configuration across all systems
Geographical redundancy so customers can centrally manage geographically dispersed systems and apply.


Barracuda's claim to be "affordable" means cheap. Ultimately, a customer gets what they pay for. Barracuda appliances can be priced so low because their technology is almost all Open Source, meaning they have no intellectual property. • Their reliance on Open Source technology creates a high degree of instability and security gaps. • In addition, Barracuda uses extremely cheap components in their appliances, resulting in a high percentage of defects on arrival, as well as a high failure rate in the field. • Installation is not as simple as they claim with no install wizard available for system setup	IronPort’s sweet spot is enterprise customers. Their appliances are known to be expensive, requiring larger budgets. They have been known to provide drastic discounts for strategic accounts. • IronPort SenderBase (their 2nd generation reputation service) has the most volume of DNS‐based blocklists and hence does not provide highly effective connection‐level blocking of inbound threats, requiring the appliance to process significantly more traffic. Customers must deploy AsyncOS for high performance. • IronPort’s SenderBase is a poor reputation system, blocking only 80% of inbound threats, which is why AsyncOS is so important they have to process more traffic than WatchGuard XCS. • IronPort requires a dedicated management console to manage multiple email or web security appliances, and policies cannot be configured across multiple protocols.	While Websense has never been discredited for performance, its email security solutions rely on most of the messages being dropped by the ThreatSeeker Network, which has been cited by analysts as being weak for IP-based protection resulting in an 80% (at best) block rate. This would mean that in a scenario where 1M messages are attempting to establish an SMTP connection, 200,000 messages would be cleared by the ThreatSeeker Network to enter the network.
• Barracuda does not offer message‐level redundancy on any of its boxes. This technology is unique to the WatchGuard XCS appliances and is a key differentiator. • Barracuda, does, however, offer clustering and centralized management in its 400 or higher models.	Although IronPort does offer centralized management, clustering, and hardware redundancy, it does NOT offer messagelevel redundancy (i.e. queue replication), and hence if a system goes down, messages can be lost.	Websense cannot support multiple layers of redundancy unless the customer deploys a hosted model.


Proofpoint is one of the few email security vendors that leverages a cloud‐based approach to eliminate costs associated with hardware based offerings, hence reducing costs associated with rackspace, power consumption, maintenance, training, administrative costs, etc. WatchGuard does not currently offer a full‐service cloud based service, however Reputation-Authority, which blocks more than 98% of threats at the connection‐level is considered a cloud based service, so part of the XCS offering is cloud‐based. • For those customers seeking a hardware appliance model, however, Proofpoint products offer little to no differences with scanning technology than other enterprise class email security providers. Proofpoint takes a modular approach, hence requiring users to pay additional fees for outbound protection, etc. Their solution is one of the most expensive enterprise‐class email security solutions available.	Cisco Spam & Virus Blocker’s SenderBase is a poor reputation system, blocking only 80% of inbound threats, and hence the appliance has to process more traffic than WatchGuard XCS. • In comparison, because of the 98% block rate of Reputation-Authority, XCS is required to filter only 2% of traffic, freeing up the network to process significantly higher volumes of safe traffic only.
• Proofpoint does NOT offer geographic or message‐level redundancy (i.e. queue replication). Hence if a system goes down, messages can be lost. • WatchGuard XCS, on the other hand, provides patented queue replication technology ‐ a key differentiator ‐ ensuring that no messages are ever lost. In addition, XCS geographic redundancy allows the ability to manage XCS systems across the global from a centralized management console.	Cisco Spam & Virus Blocker does not offer any redundancy.

Visit our XCS page here.

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