Cybersecurity incidents have been identified as the leading global risk for businesses in 2023. And why does securing your email matter more than ever? Because email is the leading threat vector for a breach – responsible for up to 90% of all breaches.
Email security has come a long way since its first inception around the year 2000. The greatest external threats facing on-premise mail servers at the time was bulk unsolicited mail and spam. The other big concern was ensuring some form of disaster risk redundancy in case the physical location that stored the mail servers was hit by a disaster like a flood or fire.
Built for an on-premise world, Secure Email Gateways (SEGs) were focused on solving pretty specific problems. Some vendors focused on filtering spam while others focused on ensuring email communication continually.
Public cloud adoption started shortly after this period, however it is only in recent years that it has accelerated, displacing on-premise data centers as the new IT infrastructure of choice. Gartner predicts by 2025, 85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle, and 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed in cloud-native platforms – up from 30% in 2021.
The accelerated cloud adoption is already starting to pose fundamental questions up and down the IT stack, with the efficacy of security solutions developed for an on-premise world, starting to be drawn into question.
The effectiveness of legacy approaches to email security in particular, has been in the crosshairs for quite some time. This is largely due to the declining effectiveness of Secure Email Gateway (SEG) and the pervasiveness of threats hitting inboxes, with email responsible for over 90% of cyber attacks.
More specifically, SEG security effectiveness is declining for two reasons:
Once a threat actor is able to bypass the SEG, they effectively have unmitigated access to carry out their threat campaign. This can (and often does) include Account Takeover (ATO), deploying exploit kits or more damagingly, delivering ransomware. And to compound matters, little protection is offered against insider threats – a growing concern.
Microsoft 365, which includes Exchange Online Protection (EOP) and Microsoft 365 Defender for Office, provides a reasonable degree of email security that effectively makes the legacy SEG redundant.
M365 on E5 licensing provides the following capabilities:
Microsoft alone, however, does not guarantee against advanced email threats. Significant gaps remain in Microsoft’s ability to protect against advanced social engineering campaigns that can result in business email compromise (BEC), ATO, or zero day exploitation. And this is why these shortcomings are also reflected in Microsoft’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) exclusions, for example excluding guarantees against zero day exploits and phishing in non-English languages. Its insider risk capabilities and ability to prevent data loss on email too are limited
This is where an intelligent cybersecurity solution like Tessian Cloud Email Security Platform comes into play, providing advanced email threat protection and insider risk protection on email.
With Tessian, no mail exchange (MX) records need to be changed. Tessian is able to construct a historical user email pattern map of all email behavior in the organization. The algorithm is then able to detect and prevent threats that Microsoft or SEGs have failed to detect.
This dynamic protection improves with each threat that is prevented, and unlike the in-line static nature of SEGs, it ensures 24/7 real time protection against all attack vectors, including insider threats. That is why the leading enterprises are opting for displacing their legacy SEG and augmenting Microsoft’s native security capabilities with Tessian
Tessian capabilities include:
Tessian clients also see significant efficiency gains in the SOC due to the high degree of automating triage and the enablement of a distilled view on the threats that matter – finding that needle in the haystack, in real time and in context.
For example, with one-click, SOC analysts can bulk remediate high volume phishing campaigns (aka burst attacks) that are targeting the organization as they happen. Suspicious emails are also automatically quarantined, with threat remediation context provided.
The platform provides a single pane of glass, giving security and risk leaders visibility of how cybersecurity risk is trending in their organization and the types of threats thwarted, down to individual employee-level risk scoring.
The context-aware security capability of Tessian extends to providing in-the-moment security awareness coaching to employees. The real-time security notifications flag suspicious and malicious emails received, offer a clear explanation, and coach employees towards safer behavior.
Tessian’s advanced protection and insider risk capability frees security teams to focus on mission critical tasks. Legacy email security approaches relying on SEGs simply no longer have a place in an increasingly crowded cybersecurity stack. By leveraging Microsoft 365’s native capability together with Tessian, presents an opportunity for security leaders to improve security while reducing cost and complexity.
Don’t just hear it from us: The value of Tessian’s Cloud Email Security Platform was independently verified by a Forrester study, revealing that a composite enterprise of 10,000 protected inboxes saw 268% Return On Investment (ROI) over three years after deploying Tessian. In addition to the advanced threat prevention and insider risk capabilities delivered by Tessian, this amounted to over 29,600 labor hours saved from having to triage threats and false positives from inboxes.
