The CF List: 20 Email Security Providers You Should Know
The changing threat landscape has spawned a new generation of email security providers.
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Abnormal Security is among providers “stretching the frontier toward the leading edge of where adversaries are in terms of their tactics of targeting email and the tools that they use to target emails,” said S&P Global’s Scott Crawford.
“Abnormal Security is a vendor that tracks the tactics that adversaries use as they’re getting more creative about getting through existing email defense systems,” he said.
One of the recent acquisitions in email security was HelpSystems’ acquisition of Agari.
“Agari is very much into sender validation and HelpSystems is growing into aspects of email security or security generally where workflow and support processes get involved in ensuring security in an environment,” Crawford said. “So Agari joins with HealthSystems as part of its approach to help ease an organization’s adoption of security more integrated into its normal IT and support processes.”
Area 1 Security preemptively stops business email compromise (BEC), malware, ransomware and targeted phishing attacks. By focusing on the earliest stages of an attack, Area 1 stops phish, the root cause of 95% of breaches, 24 days (on average) before they launch.
Omdia’s Rik Turner cited Avanan as a young and hungry player. It was founded as an API-based non-SEG in 2015, but then redesigned for inline deployment as well as access via API. Last month, Check Point Software Technologies announced its acquisition of Avanan.
“They’re still small compared to the behemoths in this sector, but they are ambitious and, unlike the conventional non-SEGs, they position themselves as a complete replacement for the SEGs, i.e. a head-on competitor,” he said.
Barracuda Networks is listed as a leader on the Q2 2021 Forrester Wave for Email Security. Its product portfolio includes integrated solutions for email security, cloud backup, email archiving, defense, domain-based message authentication, reporting and conformance (DMARC), static application security testing (SA&T) and web security. Barracuda Total Email Protection brings together this suite of security solutions for comprehensive protection.
“Symantec’s absorption into Broadcom took a major SEG player (No. 3 according to Omdia’s market data) into what I’ll call a rather more conservative stance vis-à-vis the market, and certainly all the main competitors have more or less explicit Symantec replacement offerings in place as a result,” Turner said. “It’s not that Symantec’s core technology in email security isn’t good, and it certainly has any number of happy and satisfied customers, but it’s not being marketed anywhere near as actively or aggressively as it once was, and I have serious doubts about the rate at which new features and functionality will be added under the Broadcom banner.”
Broadcom is listed as a strong performer on the Q2 2021 Forrester Wave for Email Security.
Cisco is listed as a strong performer on the Q2 2021 Forrester Wave for Email Security.
“An email security solution has to be integrated fairly well and fairly seamlessly with an organization’s email environment,” Crawford said. “There are a couple of email environments that are highly common. Arguably one of the most common, if not the most common, would be Microsoft Exchange. And it’s a very widely accepted form factor as being hosted delivered from the cloud, so as part of Office 365, for example. So you have to be compatible with those types of environments. Secondarily you have to be compatible with environments like Google Workspace.”
Crawford said in terms of anti-phishing and security awareness training, “you have to keep an eye on Cofense.” In July, it launched Cofense Protect MSP, a phishing protection solution that’s designed for MSPs tasked with protecting SMBs against phishing attacks.
Fortinet’s email security solution, FortiMail, connects to other Fortinet capabilities, like FortiEDR and FortiSandbox, via the Fortinet Security Fabric. FortiMail works with the vendor’s web security solutions, including its FortiIsolator browser isolation product. Fortinet delivers email security as on-premises appliances, virtual machines, cloud SaaS and direct API integration into Microsoft 365.
Fortinet is listed as a strong performer on the Q2 2021 Forrester Wave for Email Security.
Google is listed as a strong performer on the Q2 2021 Forrester Wave for Email Security.
“Google you certain need to keep an eye on just based on their existing investments in security and also the relevance to their overall security strategy,” Crawford said.
GreatHorn also focuses on where adversaries are in terms of their tactics in targeting email and the tools they use to target emails, Crawford said. GreatHorn tracks the tactics that adversaries use as they’re getting more creative about getting through existing email defense systems.
Inky is another provider meeting adversaries where they are in terms of their tactics and tools used in targeting email, Crawford said. The company’s flagship product, Inky Phish Fence, uses computer vision, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to view each email much like a human does, to block phishing attacks that get through other systems.
Crawford said KnowBe4 is a notable player in part because of its sheer reach.
“KnowBe4 is very well penetrated, particularly among midsize and smaller organizations,” he said. “So they have a very large client base in those organizations, which means their reach across a very wide swath of email targets is equally broad.”
Turner said Material Security is a provider he likes “very much.”
“They have the brashness of punk rockers (they even have a manifesto) but their tech is elegant (I almost likened them to new wave but that has connotations of endless synthesizers),” he said. “It starts with risk analysis, then builds out account takeover (ATO) prevention, leak prevention and what they call herd immunity from phishing. I’m interested to see how they fare in this market.”
Crawford said Microsoft is a good one to keep an eye on based on its existing investments in security and also the relevance of email security to its overall security strategy.
Microsoft is also listed as a leader on the Q2 2021 Forrester Wave for Email Security.
“The biggest change in the competitive landscape is the increasing footprint that the large enterprise email players – Microsoft and Google – have in the space,” Blankenship said. “Microsoft, in particular, is adding to its email security capabilities.”
Crawford said Mimecast is expanding its focus to a broader swath of security operations and enterprise security in general. In addition, Mimecast is listed as a leader on the Q2 2021 Forrester Wave for Email Security.
Crawford said Proofpoint is among email security incumbents that are broadening their portfolios. It’s listed as a leader on the Q2 2021 Forrester Wave for Email Security.
“Proofpoint has expanded its portfolio through things like social media awareness, threat intelligence, process automation for organizations and just a host of other areas in which they’ve invested,” he said.
Turner said Proofpoint being taken private by Thoma Bravo for $12.3 billion was significant.
“Private equity firms can of course be asset strippers seeking to make their money on the sale of parts, but they can also be serious investors who can turn an unprofitable company around, get it leaner and meaner, and launch it back into the market in a reinvigorated form,” he said. “The jury’s out on which will be Proofpoint’s fate, but if I were a betting man, my money would be the latter, given that the email security market is still growing.”
In May, Sophos announced SophosXDR, and extended detection and response (XDR) solution that synchronizes native endpoint, server, firewall and email security. It provides a holistic view of an organization’s environment with data set and analysis for threat detection, investigation and response.
Trend Micro is listed as a leader on the Q2 2021 Forrester Wave for Email Security.
“Email security is part of Trend Micro’s aggressive Vision One XDR strategy, which combines endpoint, network and email for threat detection and response,” Forrester said. “Trend Micro delivers email security through the cloud, virtual appliances and hybrid deployments.”
Zix delivers easy to use solutions for email encryption and data loss prevention, advanced threat protection, unified information archiving and bring your own device (BYOD) mobile security.
Zix delivers easy to use solutions for email encryption and data loss prevention, advanced threat protection, unified information archiving and bring your own device (BYOD) mobile security.
Email security is a top concern among organizations. That’s because email remains a primary means for hackers to launch ransomware and initiate data breaches.
A Hornetsecurity survey of more than 420 businesses found about one in four (23%) reported an email-related security breach. Phishing attacks caused 36% of these breaches. These targeted what’s arguably the weakest point of any security system — end users.
Our latest CF List focuses on email security. Analysts with Omdia, S&P Global Market Intelligence and Forrester weighed in on email security market trends and what it takes to be a successful provider.
Customers Want Better Protection
Joseph Blankenship is vice president and research director of security and risk at Forrester. He said the pandemic hasn’t had a direct impact on the expectations of an email security solution. What has changed is that customers are looking for better protection against phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attacks.
Forrester’s Joseph Blankenship
“The most effective solutions combine capabilities like email filtering, anti-malware, authentication, security awareness and training, phishing protection, and incident response capabilities — either in an integrated suite or through partnerships/integrations,” he said. “Email is also becoming an important part of extended detection and response (XDR), and we are seeing integrations with endpoint technologies as part of this.”
Scott Crawford is research director of information security at S&P Global Market Intelligence.
S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Scott Crawford
“Email is still one of – if not the most prevalent – means for an adversary attempting to gain a foothold in a targeted organization,” he said. “That remains true for any number of reasons. It’s simple and accessible. It requires a certain set of tactics that are fairly easy to reproduce at scale. To the extent that it relies on social engineering, people can be manipulated, and that’s one of the main things about email. It’s a primary interface between the external world, people and technology within a targeted organization. That’s a trifecta that’s really tough to beat in any other venue. So email will continue to be a popular threat vector regardless.”
Adversaries Becoming More Creative
One of the biggest trends over the last couple of years is as adversaries become more creative with their tools and techniques to target potential victims via email, the technologies they’re using have advanced accordingly, Crawford said.
“So we see a cadre of email security vendors that are seeking to push the envelope, if you will, pushing into new frontiers of what they’re actually looking for in malicious email,” he said. “They’re leading really in terms of technology innovation for recognizing these attacks and mitigating them. So that’s been probably one of the most significant things that we’ve seen over the last couple of years. That and some increased interest in sender authentication and validation.”
There’s also been some overlapping of email security and zero trust initiatives as “they do tend to have a lot in common,” Crawford said.
Rik Turner is principal analyst at Omdia, which shares a parent company with Channel Futures (Informa). He said the migration of corporate email services to the cloud has had various consequences on email security:
It meant all the secure email gateway (SEG) providers had to develop cloud-delivered SaaS services for their products.
It also brought Microsoft into the email security market, if not as a full-blown competitor, then as a provider of “good enough” protection against malware, spam and spyware, with its Exchange Online Protection (EOP) product. Microsoft doesn’t offer EOP as a standalone, so it isn’t in direct competition with SEGs. Furthermore, it continues to work with any SEG that is deployed in front of Office 365. But clearly EOP is a factor in whether or not a customer continues to renew its subscription with its SEG provider.
Changing Threat Landscape Spawns New Generation
The threat landscape at least partially is moving on from traditional malware, spam and spyware to email attack methodologies like phishing, BEC and executive fraud, Turner said.
This in turn has spawned a new generation of email security providers, dubbed non-SEGs, whose technology:
Isn’t deployed in front of Office 365, but instead integrates with it or Gmail via API.
It’s not a “one-time” look at the mail flow. It’s able to go back and pull an email even after it has already been delivered to an inbox if it has subsequently been discovered to be malicious.
SEG Market Growing
Omdia’s Rik Turner
The market for SEG technology is still growing, Turner said. Omdia has it at $1.6 billion in 2020 and growing to $2 billion in 2024, “so enterprises are clearly not ready to ditch their SEG wholesale in favor of EOP, at least not right now.”
“Beyond an SEG, you clearly need the capabilities of a non-SEG to address the more modern attack methodologies,” he said. “And whether you opt to get them from your existing SEG provider or go with one of the new kids on the block probably depends on how much you trust/like the former, your appetite for risk, and your ability and readiness to manage a second email security product in addition to your SEG. It obviously should be simpler to get the whole thing from one vendor. But maybe you’re already halfway toward easing the incumbent out, wondering whether Microsoft EOP might be able to do a good enough job on the basics, and so considering a much cheaper product from one of the pureplay non-SEG guys.”
We’ve compiled a list, in alphabetical order, of 20 top email security providers. It’s based on analysts’ feedback and recent news reports. The list, by no means complete, includes a mix of well-known providers as well as lesser-known ones making strides in email security.
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