The Email Security Gaps in Your Cloud

It’s not news that most enterprises operate in the cloud. Migration to the cloud leads to better collaboration, data storage, and lower costs compared to on-premises resources. Odds are your organization is currently enjoying the conveniences of the cloud. And the cloud has reshaped the way organizations operate, but with the migration comes new obstacles in email security, and the cloud has its own vulnerabilities. Relying on Microsoft’s add-on security features is simply not enough at stopping advanced threats.

According to Gartner, Microsoft lacks the ability to detect and eradicate 20% of the advanced email threats. Thus, they recommend a multi-tiered architecture for cloud email security, such as an integrated cloud email security (ICES) solution like Fortra's Cloud Email Protection, to supplement Microsoft’s native capabilities. These ICES solutions focus on the capability gaps of Microsoft and are generally deployed via API-based solutions or routed solution between Exchange and the mailbox.

Why Frontline Email Security Is Insufficient

Email remains a prominent target for phishing attacks. Verizon's latest Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR) states that the three primary ways in which attackers access an organization's data include phishing, stolen credentials, and exploitation of vulnerabilities. In addition, Business Email Compromise (BEC) and other social engineering attacks continue to dominate the email threat landscape and chances are, current on-premise appliances, such as a Secure Email Gateway, or off-the-shelf solutions like Microsoft 365, struggle with the challenges posed by these sophisticated threats.

According to the FBI’s 2023 IC3 Report, lost revenue due to BEC attacks ending up in user inboxes grew more than 7% between 2022 to 2023 – and had a staggering growth rate of 1000% since the IC3 started including BEC as a vector attack type back in 2015! Frontline tools were not designed to solve the targeted, social engineering-based attacks. In fact, a Fortra 2023 study found that the leading cloud email provider missed 625 threats annually for every 1,000 users!

Can Your Email Security Solution Keep Up with Your Capabilities?

As cloud adoption continues, the existing capabilities offered by secure email gateways and native cloud service providers fall short in providing adequate detection of BEC and the like because they don’t contain any malicious links or attachments and completely rely on social engineering tactics. Basically, the spoofed content is enhanced for legitimacy making them look believable to recipients – including your email security platform.

Due to all of this, email security can often feel like running on a treadmill. As soon as you feel good about your email security posture, new threats emerge causing the cycle of spending more on layers of protection with multiple vendors and environments to manage, which is very unwieldy to keep up with. This underscores why I believe keeping digital information safe and advocating for proactive measures to protect sensitive information through email is vital to an organization. As a former Senior Principal Analyst at Gartner, I helped clients address email security issues like phishing protection and unstructured data protection. Which is why I am thrilled to be a part of Fortra’s Advanced Email Security team!

Fortra's Cloud Email Protection

The launch of Fortra’s Cloud Email Protection encompasses an array of advanced features like AI/ML-driven detection, threat intelligence, and security awareness training and much more. I eagerly anticipate leading initiatives that drive innovation within this dynamic product landscape at Fortra.

All of this is why Fortra combined capabilities from Agari, Clearswift, and PhishLabs in 2023 to create a new cloud email security platform that delivers multi-faceted defense against advanced email threats in ONE single solution. The foundation of Cloud Email Protection encapsulates data science, global inbox threat intelligence, and automated remediation. This foundation makes Cloud Email Protection the only integrated cloud email security solution to stop threats that bypass traditional email security defenses by combining these features into a single cloud-native platform:

• Data Science: Through data science and AI, Cloud Email Protection applies machine learning models, large language models and neural networks to stop unknown threats. 
• Global Inbox Threat Intelligence: By crowdsourcing malicious indicators from user inboxes worldwide, Cloud Email Protection can stop emerging threats.
• Email Threat Operations: Cloud Email Protection mines threat data across millions of user inboxes and develops countermeasures for novel attack patterns. 
• Continuous Detection and Response: At enterprise scale, Cloud Email Protection automatically finds and eradicates threats throughout the email environment. 
• Security Awareness Training (Add-on): Through fun, engaging, accessible content, Fortra's Terranova Security offering strengthens your organization's information security and builds key cyber threat resilience in your employees with powerful, easy-to-use security awareness training and phishing simulations.

All these capabilities are part of Fortra’s Cloud Email Protection product which perfectly embodies my vision of a comprehensive email security solution. I am thrilled to be part of the team contributing to Cloud Email Protection and eagerly anticipate leading initiatives that drive innovation within this dynamic product landscape at Fortra.