Email is the number one attack vector for stealing money, credentials and data. It’s where your business network is most vulnerable. The continued evolution and proliferation of email security threats are driving organizations around the world to look to varied technology solutions to maintain an effective security strategy.
As more and more organizations migrate to Microsoft Office 365, attackers are finding they have an easier target for a number of reasons, including:
- Most organizations invest in a mix of E1 and E3 licenses, which ultimately lack advanced threat prevention and detection and response capabilities.
- Anyone with a credit card can sign up for and use O365, meaning attackers can test O365 effectiveness against their own payloads and understand how to bypass its filters.
Many organizations are realizing that migrating to O365 and leveraging its native security tools doesn’t mitigate their risk. They are looking for solutions to deliver visibility, resilience and automation. Looking to Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) may not be the answer, as it is typically more expensive than third-party solutions—lacking the ability to address specific threats while prone to the same weakness enabling hackers to bypass filters.
Effectively mitigating malicious content requires insight into an organization’s specific use cases and threat potential. The Office 365 ATP provides a good security blanket, but it can’t be fully tailored to the specific security needs of each organization. This is the advantage of working with third-party email and cybersecurity providers, who can not only often better secure your organization’s intellectual and sensitive data at a lower cost, but also help you avoid the pitfall of “deploy and forget” so that you don’t lose momentum on your security strategy.
Top 5 Qualities of a Reliable Email Security Provider
A strong email security program is a vital part of any organization’s cybersecurity strategy. Below, we identify five must-haves when partnering with solution providers to evaluate your email security needs and identify the appropriate solution(s) to mitigate risk, increase productivity and reduce operational overhead.
1. Leads with an evaluation of your current security posture
An evaluation of your current-state security posture is absolutely the first and most necessary step in designing and implementing a truly effective email security solution. A good solution provider knows this and will lead with an evaluation that will help identify threat vulnerabilities.
2. Takes an independent approach to designing a cost-effective security solution
A solution provider with deep expertise and experience across varied use cases and security products will be able to help you identify the security products and strategies that best meet your organization’s unique requirements. These providers will hold credentials across the most used and most effective email security products and be able to take an agnostic approach to design a tailored solution.
3. Offers visibility and insight into the security threat landscape
Your security solution provider should have visibility into the threat landscape with an insight that enables awareness to new threats as they emerge. This includes access to global threat information sharing networks and threat intelligence and analysis with information from third parties.
4. Provides managed services that proactively update configurations and provide training
Because they are tapped into the threat landscape, an effective email security solution provider will be able to fine-tune your defenses when new threats are detected, updating security configurations proactively. Along with regular training to keep users abreast of evolving malicious email tactics, this is essential to ensuring protection stays up to par.
5. Enables rapid threat detection and response
A solution provider with deep expertise, visibility and insight into the threat landscape will be able to detect threats early on and respond more quickly to minimize damage and recover should an attack occur. They’ll use the information gathered over the lifecycle of the attack to inform future threat detection. This includes what happened before, during and after the attack; the severity of the attack; and the response that was initiated to stop the attack.
Email security depends on an effective partnership
With the increasing tendency of attackers to target organizations via email and the explosion of email security manufacturers/vendors, partnering with a solution provider who has deep expertise will help you design and implement a strategy that will deliver your business objectives while reducing your risk to an acceptable level.
