When organizations invest in advanced email protection, it’s not just to get a technical upgrade. Rather, it’s a strategic business decision, and one that can significantly enhance organizational outcomes.
Here’s how email security can translate into your everyday – resulting in misses or benefits for both employees and the organization as a whole:
The Cost of Ineffective Email Protection
Each day, employees spend countless hours responding to emails. The majority of these emails come from colleagues and peers. However, spammers and cyber criminals can easily infiltrate employees’ inboxes.
If your organization has weak or insufficient email security tools, your business may be at-risk, and to a greater extent than you may be aware of. Inadequate email security protections can lead to:
- Delayed retraction of harmful messages. Legacy security gateways, including Microsoft Defender, may deliver emails to the inbox while in the process of analyzing them; retracting harmful messages after the fact. This can potentially lead to clicks on malicious messages.
- An increase in workplace distractions, as employees may have to think about and analyze potential phishing emails and then manually report phishing attempts. This diverts focus from core tasks.
- Data breaches, which can result in outsized financial losses and unreconcilable reputational damage.
- Compliance failures, which can result in regulatory penalties, potentially jeopardizing financial earnings.
- A massive waste of the security teams’ time, as they deal with false positives, wade through phishing emails and respond to employees’ reports of phishing.
“No amount of employee training is ever going to be effective for phish-click prevention. There are over 300 characteristics to inspect before delivery, and employees have no clue, no skill, and no time to analyze,” says Check Point CISO, Pete Nicoletti.
“Your security program is a failure if you deliver malicious email, or your endpoint tools can’t stop the malicious file download from a clicked on URL. Training employees is “Security Theater” and if you count on them to be a line in your defense, keep your incident response and your lawyer on speed dial.”
Investing in Advanced Email Security Solutions
Advanced email security solutions – especially those with a proven track-record and from a trusted vendor – not only safeguard organizations effectively, but also enhance operational efficiency.
The most advanced email protection solutions leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) to identify and neutralize threats in real time.
“An AI-powered email security tool can analyze over 300 aspects of an email, including the nuances of email subject lines, previous email history, SMTP characteristics, and email body content to zero-in on anomalies that legacy, gateway-based email systems may otherwise miss,” Nicoletti notes.
After detecting a potential threat, advanced email solutions will not deliver it to the inbox. Corresponding actions may include quarantining suspicious emails, blocking harmful attachments, removing dangerous links and even notifying the IT team about the need for further investigation.
Advanced emails security solutions can effectively mitigate email security risks before they can cause any true harm.
Choosing the Right Email Protection Solution
Given the critical importance of email security, organizations need to ensure that they’re making wise choices. “The easiest way to evaluate a superior efficacy email solution is to install it last in line, behind Defender or any old conventional gateway. The number of attacks that the last in line solution stops will typically be astonishing. Make your next decision based on the email risks and challenges in your environment,” says Nicoletti.
Select an email security vendor that not only offers advanced solutions, but that also focuses on the user experience. The easier that it is for employees to interact with the system, the more effectively that it will protect the organization.
In addition, seek out vendors that regularly add new features. Check Point’s Harmony Email & Collaboration security platform has added roughly 150 new features since 2021 – making it a stand-out tool within the market.