Navigating the End of Life for Forcepoint Email Security

Fork-lifting end-of-life (EOL) technology is an everyday reality faced by CIOs, CISOs, and CFOs. Manufacturers decide when a product has run its course.

By the way, this is a good thing for the tech industry.

Products often become less effective as the global threat landscape rapidly changes. These changes, including adversarial artificial intelligence (AI), create far more impactful cyberattacks. Current and legacy security solutions fail to stop these next-generation attacks.

Forcepoints’ decision and process to end of life its email security is consistent with many other tech firms recognizing their product’s value to the market has changed.

Trustifi, a global leader in cloud-based email security solutions powered by AI, continues innovating its multi-layered approach to address the changing threat landscape. Clients leveraging Forcepoint email security should schedule a demo with the Trustifi team today.

Click here to schedule your initial demonstration and receive a quote!

Understanding the Transition.

Transitioning from one cybersecurity technology to another platform has traditionally been a harrowing and challenging event. Often, during these transitions, security air gaps within the client’s network become exposed and exploited.

Several issues include migrating legacy security telemetry data into the new solution, migrating to the new solution without affecting the users, and fully migrating to the new solution without overlapping licensing costs.

Addressing these questions is critical to ensuring a proper, secure, cost-effective transition from Forcepoint email security to a new solution.

Overview of the Forcepoint Email Security End of Life (EOL) announcement.

Forcepoint’s public announcement regarding the EOL of its email security solution was posted on its product lifecycle page. Following industry best practices, Forcepoint originally announced a general availability date, end-of-sale, end-of-development, end-of-maintenance, and end-of-support dates. Traditionally, tech companies make public product replacement recommendations, including considering other vendors’ solutions.

Note: Forcepoint will continue to offer data loss prevention (DLP) for email security at the time. However, Forcepoint currently does not provide public solutions or email security recommendations.

Note: Current Forcepoint DLP clients using email security must ensure their protection functions within DLP do not become disabled or changed during the transition to other email security solutions.

Auditing Your Current Forcepoint Email Security To Ensure Compliance and Security Readiness During the Transition Period.

Legacy Forcepoint email clients must develop a plan to migrate off this solution without affecting their current security posture and compliance readiness.

The first step is for the organization to engage a third-party security assessment firm to review the current Forcepoint email security for vulnerabilities. Resolving these vulnerabilities should be a top priority when reviewing alternative solutions.

Do these vulnerabilities also exist inside other email security solutions?

Completing an audit of the existing system also helps the organization evaluate whether merging the various email security protection layers should be replaced. Legacy email security solutions like Forcepoint provide additional protection layers, including DLP, for email as separate products.

Does moving to an entirely different solution raise a concern about whether to stay on existing protection layers from Forcepoint or consider migrating to a new platform with several fully integrated functions?

Leveraging third-party auditing and assessment firms also help determine the risk to the organization if it wants to stay on previous protection layers as standalone solutions. An audit would benefit existing Forcepoint email security consumers leveraging DLP for email.

Exploring Alternative Email Security Solutions

Migration from Forcepoint to an alternative solution is critical for the organization, and how you select a new solution is also vital.

• Are you looking for a like-for-life solution based on your current deployment of Forcepoint?
• Are you considering a more infrastructure consolidation strategy during this migration?
• What core email security features are a necessity for your organization?
• Are you leveraging a managed email security provider to help with rules creation, incident response, threat modeling, email encryption, data tokenization, continuous monitoring, and compliance reporting?
• How many engineers currently support your existing email security solution?
• How important is cost, and is their available budget to replace the existing solution now or shortly?
• Do the alternative solutions offer AI and machine learning defensive capabilities that are already included in the licensing cost?

Top Email Security Alternatives to Forcepoint Email Security

Close to twenty solutions are available in the email security space. Many of these solutions have similar functionality and costing models. Some focus more on the large enterprise client, while others deliver exceptional value to the small-to-medium business sector.

Trustifi

Globally recognized for their innovation and maturity around the adoption of AI and ML within their inbound filtering module and recently with their security awareness and attack simulations. Trustifi’s fully consolidated and integrated cloud-based solutions offer several functions, including inbound AI, outbound DLP and email encryption, dynamic security awareness, attack simulation, email archiving, account takeover prevention, and support for MFA.

Trustifi’s commitment to the SME market is displayed in its simplicity pricing model, ease-of-use management and deployment, and email-managed detection and response service (EMDR). Trustifi also supports seamless integration with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspaces.

Mimecast

Like Trustifi, industry analysts also view Mimecast as a market leader with various solution options. Mimecast has a fully integrated platform and supports on-premise deployments. The firm also offers competitive pricing and supports API integration with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspaces.

One noted challenge with Mimecast is the effort required to enable email security, DLP, and encryption policies. Most clients need to invest in extensive professional services for the initial implementation. Another challenge with Mimecast is its ongoing dependency on third-party application developers, which allows outside firms to create and support a good portion of its advances.

Proofpoint

Still considered one of the top email security providers in the industry, Proofpoint’s support for large enterprises and federal governments continues to be a focus. Proofpoint’s solution maturity, specifically around on-premise solutions, support for FedRAMP, and various protection layers, make them a strong provider.

Proofpoint continues to make inroads into the mid-enterprise and SMB marketplaces. However, its solutions are not fully integrated and require professional service engagements. Proofpoint also has various pricing models. These models often become challenging when clients want to add additional capabilities later or remove these services.

What Features From Forcepoint Should You Retain When Reviewing the Various Email Security Options?

Legacy Forcepoint email security clients evaluating alternative solutions need to ensure the following functions currently exist within the various offerings:

• Integrated DLP with email encryption
• Continuous monitoring
• Automated incident response
• Dynamic security awareness content based on actual telemetry
• Attack simulation with easy-to-follow explanations
• Simplified pricing model including all features
• Ease-of-use feature enablement
• Advanced AI and ML for inbound filtering
• Support for domain authentication includes DMARC, DKIM, and SPF.
• Prevention of next-generation attacks, including QR code, executive impersonation, and business email compromise (BEC).

Access to these features should be optimal when organizations evaluate replacing the Forcepoint email security solution.

Migrating to a New Email Security Solution

Establishing a process to move from Forcepoint email security to an alternative solution should leverage the following workflow:

• Complete a comprehensive evaluation of other email security solutions.
• Perform a proof-of-concept (POC) with other email security solutions to ensure initial capability and functionality.
• Validate a successful import of user accounts and existing data and rules.
• Execute an initial training program for the security engineers and test user group.
• Validate the compliance and security protection capabilities align with the organization’s mandates.
• Develop a post-POC scoring matrix aimed at selecting the best alternative solution.

Step-by-Step Migration Plan

There are crucial elements Forcepoint clients need to consider during their transition phase:

• Ensure all email security telemetry information is stored within a Security Information Event Management (SIEM).
• Ensure all current emails with a legal hold status remain stored within a secured depository outside of the existing email solution.
• Ensure all DLP rules, email filtering settings, active directories, or LDAP groups are adequately documented.
• Ensure all existing inbound and outbound firewall rules specific to email security are well-documented.
• Ensure MFA policies transfer to the new email security solution.
• Verify all other dependencies within the existing Forcepoint email security, including DNS settings, API connectors, or access by third-party managed security service providers. Performing an spf lookup is recommended to confirm your domain authentication records are properly configured.

How to Minimize Downtime and Disruption?

Problems will happen with any technical migration. Preventing user disruption is a goal in every migration plan. However, things will go wrong, and ultimately, the users and customers will be affected.

Developing a migration plan that minimizes downtown starts with selecting the correct alternative solution to replace the Forcepoint email security offering.

• Ensure the plan to execute a whole cut from Forcepoint to the alternative solution or overlap the solution is supported through additional MX records or API connectivity.
• Ensure all active directory groups, user accounts, and email security policies work adequately during the POC stage.
• Notify all users of the window for the cutover between email security solutions.
• Provide an escalation plan for support in case of any technical issues happen.
• Leverage vendor support services as needed.
• Provide an easy-to-use checklist for all users to walk through the initial migration steps they will need to complete on their side.
• After the initial cutover of email flow from Forcepoint to the alternative solution, request the users execute the following:
• Send and receive five emails to validate that this function is working.
• Go into the email security portal to see if they can release quarantine emails.
• Complete the initial security awareness training module with the new email security solution.
• Send two additional emails with encryption enabled on each message.

Ensuring Compliance and Security During Transition

While transitioning from Forcepoint to the alternative email security solution, organizations need various compliance and regulator functions to work as expected.

• Do all outbound DLP policies work as expected?
• Attempt to email with fake social security numbers without email encryption and validate if the system-wide policy either blocked or applied encryption to the message.
• Validate that the centralized dashboard is continuously monitoring all email security protection layers.
• Ensure all users have completed the security awareness training modules.
• Execute an account simulation campaign to test the user’s knowledge and awareness of an email phishing attack.
• Validate that DMARC, DKIM, and SPF authentication protection are set up and working.
• Validate that inbound AI is working and that the automated incident response capabilities are functioning.
• Ensure MFA becomes enabled for management console access.

Evaluating Managed Services for Post-Migration Coverage

Organizations that successfully have migrated from Forcepoint to an alternative solution often leverage email detection and response (EMDR) services. Leveraging EMDR, especially during the post-migration phase, helps organizations manage through any rules and policy changes, fine-tune the automation incident response capabilities, adjust the outbound DLP functions, and establish continuous monitoring and reporting schemes.

Conclusion

Transitioning from Forcepoint to alternative solutions like Trustifi starts with a coherent plan of action to ensure no disruptions to the users, prevent the creation of air gap vulnerabilities, and ensure the organization maintains its compliance readiness status and security posture.

The opportunity to migrate from Forcepoint allows an organization to evaluate and implement next-generation email security protection layers, including AI, ML, automated incident response, and dynamic security awareness training and attack simulation.