The benefits of a dedicated email security solution

Businesses of all kinds rely on emails for their communication needs. Billions of emails are sent and received every day, making it one of the epicenters of important business information. All of this information being transacted in emails makes it a lucrative target for threat actors. They come up with novel ways of gaining unauthorized access to emails and use it for their benefit. With newer and evolving cyber threats on the horizon, the onus is on the organization’s email administrator to secure their business data.

With threat actors finding increasingly innovative ways to bypass the security filters that come built into email providers, using an email security solution has become imperative.  A dedicated email security solution adds an extra layer of protection to your organization’s emails, spotting even the emails that may slip through your email provider’s security defenses. In this article, we’ll dive into the many benefits of using an email security solution to complement the security provided by your email provider.

The email security landscape

Just over the past year, email security has evolved massively and continues to do so. Threats haven’t just increased in volume but also in their sophistication. One common example comes in the form of URLs that appear safe but mutate into malicious URLs upon reaching the users’ mailboxes. Emails containing attachments and images have also become a common vector to invade an organization’s emails because they could lead to spoofed websites or download malware onto the users’ systems.

The rising need for email security

According to a 2024 email security risk report, 94% of organizations experienced security incidents. With this rising stature of email threats, securing your organization’s emails is more vital than before. This brings about the need for a multidimensional approach to email security. Enhancing your organization’s email security measures protects your users from exposure to advanced email attacks, keeping their data and identity secure.

Without the right email security measures in place, users risk interception, loss, or exfiltration of sensitive business and personal data. This could be through hackers impersonating other authentic users whom the recipient trusts, nudging them to reveal sensitive information such as account credentials. This information could further be used for their financial gain, or it could be one part of a larger attack. Having robust email security measures in place could help weed out these attacks right from the initial stage.

Shortcomings with email providers’ security features

The most commonly used email security providers have built-in security features that are designed to prevent malicious or suspicious emails from entering recipient mailboxes. However, email has been in use for decades now. The architecture of email in general is known to many, and this makes it open and accessible to a larger crowd. This makes email an easy target for hackers. They identify vulnerabilities in an organization’s email defense and exploit it to gain unauthorized access.

If an email provider’s security measures aren’t strong enough, hackers target emails when they’re in transit and find a way to intercept and read or modify the emails for their benefit. Even though most email providers have deployed measures against such attacks, hackers are finding ways to slip through these defenses. In addition, with about 95% cybersecurity leaders feeling stressed about email security, it’s high time businesses implement an additional layer of security for their emails.

The role of an email security solution

A dedicated email security solution works on securing your organization’s mailboxes from external threats, on top of the security in your email provider. While offering all of the basic features to prevent threats from entering your email environment, it also provides advanced threat protection, shielding your business from impersonated emails or domains, phishing emails, emails containing malware, and zero-day attacks.

Prevent unauthorized access

Having the necessary security measures in place at the recipient email server’s end helps identify if the emails are spoofed or if they’ve been tampered with during transit. If the origin or the content of the email appears suspicious for some reason, an email security solution alerts the recipient or marks the email as spam. This helps users classify the legitimate emails from those seeking to gain unauthorized access into users’ accounts.

Protect from data loss

If a threat actor finds a way past your security defenses, there’s a possibility that they also have access to valuable data such as financial statements, customer transactions, account credentials, and more. When a hacker gets access to an important account, they can deny access to the actual owner of the account and even threaten to delete important information if the organization doesn’t comply with their demands. Email security solutions stop such emails with malicious intent from getting through to users’ mailboxes.

Verify email authenticity

Email security solutions usually act as an additional layer between the sending and recipient email servers. By acting as a secondary layer of protection, they identify any attempts at unauthorized access by checking for SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication. It also checks for the authenticity of the email sending domain and the email address to ensure that a hacker isn’t impersonating a trusted contact to manipulate the recipient into revealing sensitive information. If revealed, this information could let the hacker into the organization’s email environment and give them full access.

Shield from cyber threats

With hackers finding increasingly nuanced ways to portray their emails as legitimate ones, the security provided by just the email provider does not seem to suffice. Advanced cyber threats such as business email compromise, credential harvesting, account takeovers, ransomware, and other such attacks are sometimes hard to spot. Email security solutions have advanced threat detection mechanisms that could aid with identifying malicious patterns and warning users.

Avert data leaks

As important as it is to prevent data loss, it's equally important to stop sensitive data from getting leaked to external or unintended members. Data leaks are becoming increasingly common, and more often than not, an organization’s disgruntled employees are behind the leak. Email security solutions provide robust data leak prevention features that let an organization’s admin choose exactly what kind of data is sensitive and guards the sharing of such data with utmost security. This way, your data remains yours alone.

The benefits of a dedicated email security solution

Implementing a dedicated email security solution to secure your business emails has many benefits, ranging from improved email security to complying with industry regulations. This ensures that the onus of deciding the authenticity of an email isn’t just left with the user but offers a guided approach to minimizing manual errors that could lead to huge monetary and reputational repercussions.

Protect from phishing and spoofing emails

Emails that spoof the identity of legitimate senders have become more prevalent recently. These emails that impersonate identities can be sent with varying intentions. One common intention behind these emails is to gain access to confidential information, which is known as phishing. This can include account credentials, invoices, contracts, intellectual property, among others.

Email security solutions with advanced threat intelligence can spot these emails through real-time detection and behavioral analysis even if the legacy email provider’s defenses aren’t enough to detect these emails.

Detect emails with viruses or malware

When certain files are transmitted through email under the guise of a legit email sender, recipients open the attached files and download them without exercising enough caution. Sometimes, threat actors create files with viruses that can disrupt the device or the email environment it’s in. When the email provider’s threat processing isn’t advanced enough to detect these files, they get through the basic defenses without any trouble.

Email security providers process such attachments in an isolated, virtual sandbox environment to test the file’s behavior and to scan for the presence of any malicious content in the file. Only when the file is confirmed to be harmless is it sent to the recipient’s mailbox.

Combat zero-day attacks

Zero-day attacks refer to novel threats that have not previously emerged, so they aren’t detected as suspicious. These threats can potentially be any type of previously occurring threat in a new format, or a new threat altogether. These threats pass through most email providers’ security filters because they don’t have any history or context based on which they could be blocked. The tricky nature of these threats requires a comprehensive and proactive approach to tackling them.

Email security solutions that focus on neutralizing these threats have defense mechanisms in place that can combat these threats based on pattern analysis and behavior detection. They identify and prevent these threats from reaching mailboxes before they cause any harm.

Prevent data breaches

Almost all of the commonly known attacks, such as phishing, spoofing, malware, and zero-day threats, are dispersed with certain goals in mind. These goals could be to harvest critical information, deny access to email accounts, impersonate the hacked email account, or delete the sensitive data altogether. When hackers invade an email system, they land upon a gold mine of data that can make all of these actions possible.

When an email security solution is deployed, these attacks can be stopped with higher efficiency. These solutions deploy sandboxing, content and pattern analysis, attachment analysis, bulk filtering, time-of-click alerts, and other such novel techniques to spot these fraudulent emails. Further action can be taken on these emails based on the admin’s configurations.

Guard data through behavioral analysis

Email data usually follows certain established patterns. Usually, email security solutions analyze and keep track of these patterns. The anti-spam and threat protection engines in these solutions are designed based on this data. So, at any point, if there’s a deviation from these patterns, the emails are flagged and further investigated. This can be derived based on the connection or content analysis, unknown sender domains or email addresses, and the learnings from different universal block lists.

Comply with regional and industry regulations

Businesses that fall under some sectors, such as healthcare, manufacturing, and finance, are mandated by law to enhance the security of certain types of data. Additionally, based on the region that a business is based out of, they might be required to adhere to region-specific regulations. Some of these regulations include GDPR, HIPAA, FINRA, GLBA. The security features provided by an email security solution, such as advanced threat protection, auditing, and sandboxing, help organizations get one step closer to complying with the relevant industrial regulations.

Consolidate and track security reports

Email security solutions focus on enhancing your organization’s security and protecting your data from external threats. With this core goal, detailed information about the kinds of threats blocked, email bounces, quarantine reports, and authentication failures is maintained. Email administrators can simply take a look at this extensive data in one place and make decisions regarding how to configure security for their email data better and modify them as required.

Conduct security awareness trainings

As important as it is to strengthen your email security, it’s equally important that your users are well-versed in taking the required precautions while handling malicious emails. Employee trainings can be conducted by the cybersecurity lead of the organization, and the effect of these trainings can be evaluated by simulated emails. Email security solutions can help in simulating suspicious emails, along with detailed tracking to check the response of individual employees when they come in contact with such emails.

Streamline disaster response

When all email security data regarding your organization is consolidated and displayed in one place, it makes it simpler for the admins to analyze the data and nudge their employees to take relevant action. In case a breach occurs, both admins and employees can proactively respond to the incident by assessing the nature and severity of the attack. When every employee in an organization knows their role and the course of action to be taken when an attack ensues, the response to the incident will be much faster and more efficient.

Wrapping up

Legacy email providers offer a wide range of security features that help keep out basic email threats. However, with the evolving nature of the email threat landscape, having an email security solution that complements the basic security provided by email providers becomes imperative. It adds an essential layer of defense, helps organizations comply with regulations, prevents data loss and leak, offers financial benefits, and increases employee productivity.

eProtect is a cloud-based email security and archiving solution that provides an additional layer of security for email accounts. The solution offers advanced threat detection mechanisms that can secure on-premise and cloud email accounts from evolving email threats. eProtect is the security solution powering Zoho Mail, a platform trusted by millions of users.