Top Email Security Solutions You Should Consider

Global threat landscapes change daily with new malicious email attacks, next-generation phishing emails, and social engineering. These sudden and often unpredictable changes in email attack methods directly result from hackers adopting artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools. With the addition of adversarial AI attacks, malware infections from ransomware and credential theft continue to affect organizations even with existing email security tools.

This article discusses the importance of organizations researching email security solutions to cope with new cyber threats. Next-generation email phishing attacks, impersonation, and deep fake attacks compel organizations to study options if their solution cannot keep up with increased suspicious emails, malicious content, and human error from misconfiguration.

Trustifi, a global leader in advanced AI email security, invests considerable capital in updating its advanced features to give its clients the most efficient and cost-effective solution. However, organizations still need to research alternatives because they, not Trustifi, are ultimately responsible for protecting their messages, security posture, data, and users.

Why Look for an Alternative Solution?

Organizations must invest time researching alternative solutions for every security adaptive control, not just email security. New security solution providers continue to enter the market to help solve strategic security requirements, help clients with tactical stop-gap issues such as zero-day exploiting, or assist clients with additional adaptive controls to meet compliance and regulatory requirements.

Organizations striving for a more consolidated approach to email security by merging several protection layers into one platform still need to open to alternatives. The value of consolidated email security still reigns true for small-to-medium (SMB) and mid-enterprise. However, compliance regulations have changed, and hackers have evolved their email phishing campaigns faster than most security providers can react. This reality compels SMBs to invest time in either an alternative to their existing strategy or adding a stop-gap solution to solve the immediate threat.

What Are The Challenges When Researching Alternative Email Security Solutions?

Researching any security solution, including consolidating email security, takes time. Internal or contracting resources need time to examine alternative solutions. This effort requires funding, patience, and purpose. Taking value resources and financial capital away from other IT or security projects needs to be weighed against the value of the research.

Larger organizations with a formal vendor management department have the budget and experienced resources to conduct their research, develop a formal request for proposal (RFP) seeking alternative solutions, and offer incumbent providers the chance to continue providing future services.

The Value and Disadvantage of the RFP Process.

Investing in an RFP process takes several months to compile the organization’s needs to solve its email security challenges. The organization should develop a 24-month roadmap to ensure any future security adaptive controls assist the organization with future security needs.

The RFP also allows incumbent and prospective security providers to present their various offers, solutions, and capabilities for managed services. Bidders can also discuss the projected cost of their solution.

A common concern CISOs, CIOs, and vendor management departments have is the discussion around the cost of their current solution and the perception of value they receive from the incumbent provider in stopping malicious email threats. Hence, this mindset drives the organization to consider alternatives for their current email security solution.

Incumbent’s Mindset During an RPF Process.

Incumbent providers look to profit on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) contract halfway through year three of a current agreement. They work diligently with the client to receive a renewal of their existing contract with a 5% bump in fees. These renewals drive a technology solution organization’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) number. Investors measure SaaS-based solution providers based on their ARR and the % of renewals of existing contracts.

Highly competitive bidders may consider lowballing their offer to win the business. These cost dynamics pose a risk to the organization.

• If an organization creates an RFP and the incumbent holds firm on their 5% increase, it could spend money replacing their solution. This swap out requires funding and experienced engineering resources.
• Suppose any organization accepts a low bid from a startup security provider and cannot fulfill its three-year obligation. In that case, this will cause additional swap-out costs for the organization to replace this solution.

What Are Some Key Factors to Consider When Choosing an Alternative Email Security Solution?

Organizations wanting to replace email security solutions must consider several issues before deciding.

Be Clear on the Why.

Swapping out any security technology takes effort. No security adaptive control is a simple plugin play. Proper planning and execution, with an essential fall-back plan, must be in place before displacing the existing solution. Here are some why questions all organizations should ask themselves when considering an alternative solution.

• What is wrong with your current email solution?
• Does the current solution work as promised by the provider?
• Does the current offering stay current with the constant changes to the email threat landscape?
• Does the provide add advanced security protection capabilities, including AI and ML, to help combat adversarial AI?
• Did the incumbent provider add these features without additional costs?
• Did the incumbent perform services within their contract service level agreement (SLA)?
• Is there a current possibility of the incumbent provider becoming acquired by private equity or a much larger firm?
• Did the incumbent provide expected support for their solution in a timely matter?

Organizations investing the time to answer should have a grasp on the why. Once they have finished answering these questions, the next question is about who.

Be Clear on the Who.

Adding a new provider to the organization also requires time, funding, and patience. With any technology decision, the provider and the prospective client must ensure that future business makes sense for both parties.

Here is a series of questions organizations should ask when considering reviewing other providers for email security.

• Do the prospective providers currently service our organization’s competitors?
• How long has the prospect been around the email security marketplace?
• Are they publicly traded or venture capital funded?
• Does Gartner, Forrester, or IDC recognize them as a sound choice for email security?
• Does the prospective provider develop 100% of the product internally or rely on third-party software providers?
• Where does the story their data? US or overseas?
• Does the provider offer a one-size-fits-all model, or can a new client deploy and pay for features based on their needs?
• Who are the prospective’s top three clients?
• Does the prospective provider offer a trial program for their solution?

Organizations should invest time in understanding the who and why before considering replacing their current solution.

What are the Core Features Every Email Security Needs To Have?

Organizations wanting to increase their email protection against AI-enabled email phishing attacks, meet compliance regulations, and lower operational costs must ensure the following features are available to all prospective security providers.

• An AI-advanced inbound filtering solution with a proven mature engine is a must.
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is essential to protecting organizations if a phishing attack exploits a user when a hacker attempts to steal data through the email channel.
• Ease-of-use email encryption integrated with DLP is essential. Providers offering email security without a seamless integration between DLP and email encryption should not be considered. Legacy email encryption capabilities have proven to be a challenge for users and often become bypassed, leading to sensitive information being sent externally unprotected.
• Support for data tokenization is a must. Data tokenization is a complementary capability to email encryption. It helps mask sensitive information within the email message without depending on encryption.
• Archiving emails for eDiscovery is a must. Email security providers who do not offer email archiving should not be considered an alternative to your current solution. Email archiving must come with the ability to set retention and legal hold required. Having a seamless archive helps organizations meet compliance and legal requirements.
• A centralized management console, including unified monitoring and reporting, is a must. Managing email security after the initial deployment is essential to maintaining the proper state of readiness and compliance. Email security offerings that lack solid reporting, monitoring, or automated incident response should not be considered an alternative solution.

A transparent licensing model is one of the most essential elements of any email security. Several email security providers offer tiered pricing. Some may offer everything for one low price, while others charge by the feature. Understanding how the provider’s license and feature model works is essential for the organization to have a clear understanding.

What Are Top Competitor Alternatives For Email Security?

Email security marketing is competitive, crowded, and very challenging to navigate. Some email security providers focus on SMBs, mid-to-large enterprises, and federal customers. “Others have one-size-fits-all solutions and pricing models.”

Here is a list of alternative email security providers that align well with the SMB marketplace.

• Trustifi: Trustifi is one of the top advanced email security solutions powered by AI for the SMB market. Their solution promotes a strong platform consolidation strategy with an ease-of-use UI for users and security operations engineers. Trustifi offers advanced filters with outbound DLP, email encryption, security awareness training, data tokenization, and comprehensive email archiving for eDiscovery.
• SpamTitan Plus: SpanTitan competes exceptionally well in the SMB market with its AI-powered email protection solution for spam, ransomware, zero-day, and email viruses. SpamTitan integrates seamlessly with M365.
• Guardz: Guardz: The email security service does exceptionally well within the managed services (MSP) space with its consolidated solution to help stop phishing attacks, ransomware, and data exfiltration. AI-powered Guardz is very easy to operate.
• Mimecast: Mimecast is a market leader in email security, supporting customers in every market segment and seize. Known for its wide range of protection layers, security awareness training, and attack simulation, Mimecast does well in stopping email phishing attacks. Their policy engine and multi-filter protection help stop sophisticated attacks.
• ZeroSpam: ZeroSpam is an easy-to-use email security with an exceptional 99.9% threat defense rating against email attacks. It integrates into M365 and has a low false positive hit rate compared to its competitors. This company offers a straightforward pricing model designed for SMBs.
• IronScales: At $4.50 per use per month, this AI-driven email security, combined with its security awareness training module, helps stop email phishing and malware attacks. The company has mastered the unique solution alignment between leveraging security awareness with AI and machine learning defensive protection.
• Avanan Cloud Email Security: Checkpoint acquired Avanan in 2015 to deliver advanced email security solutions to their existing firewall and VPN clients. Avanan’s transformation continues as the company adds AI protection to help stop business email compromise (BEC), ransomware attacks, and credential theft and reduce the impact on supply chains.
• Graphus: A true market leader in AI-based email security, this firm continues improving overall management and operations to enable its clients’ features more quickly. Their investment in incident response automation helps clients with less management and operational overhead.

How Does Each Solution Compare to Each Other?

How Should Organizations Migrate from One Email Security Provider to Another?

If the organization moves ahead with the alternative email security solution, there are several critical steps in the process of migrating:

Inbound Filtering.

• What email provider is the organization using? M365 or Google Workspaces?
• Validate the connection method between the email provider and the current email security solution.
• Are they using an MX record or email relay to direct email messaging traffic to the email security platform?
• Does the current provider have any emails living in a cloud-based archive?
• If so, what is the retention period on these current archived emails?
• Are any of these emails currently on legal hold in the archive?
• What is the cost of extracting the data from the previous email archive solution?
• Is the current solution leveraging Active Directory groups or LDAP for authentication?

Outbound Filtering and Protection.

• Does the organization have data loss protection (DLP) enabled and integrated with inbound filtering or a separate solution?
• What are the policies and compliance mandates installed on the current DLP solution?
• Is email encryption enabled on a per-user basis or system-wide?
• What additional features, including geofencing, data tokenization, and account takeover prevention, are enabled today?

Once these questions are answered, the organization will have a foundation to migrate from one email security to another.

Case Studies/Success Stories.

What is the Value of a Community and Ecosystem for Email Security Providers?

One of the core values of next-generation email security is the platform consolidation strategy. This strategy, especially for the SMB market, helps reduce cost operational complex and promotes ease of use with the user community. Consolidated email security platforms must also have a robust ecosystem to inter-operate with other security solutions and architectures. Here is a list of other security solutions and architectures with which all email security solutions should integrate.

Zero-trust Architecture:

Zero-trust architectures have become critical for organizations in managing remote connectivity, cloud access, access control, and network segmentation.

Companies Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks, Forcepoint, and Netskope are all providers of this technology. Access to email security platforms like Trustifi already integrates with Zero-trust providers to handle connections to the management console. Zero-trust helps ensure that only specific engineers and IT admins can access the management of the email security platform to make policy updates and rule changes.

XDR:

Extended detection and response (XDR) architectures collect security telemetry information from several adaptive controls, including email security, and then apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to help organizations become more proactive in dealing with zero-day attacks.

Email security platforms like Trustifi have vast amounts of security telemetry data, including elements of malware attacks, credential theft, and ransomware. This data fed into an XDR engine from LogRhythm or CrowdStrike will bring additional value in helping stop the propagation of attacks across the client’s network, cloud, and supply chain networks.

MFA:

Multi-factor authentication (MFA), a component of Zero-Trust, plays a critical role in email security. Email security providers like Trustifi leverage MFA providers like OKTA to help secure emails sent to external parties.

Enabling MFA within email security allows users to add security protection by requiring the message’s receiver to authenticate by passcode or pin before they can read the message. This adaptive control capability helps stop man-in-the-middle attacks and message hijacking.

Which Alternative Email Security Solutions Offer Managed Services?

Another critical decision for organizations considering replacing their current email security solution is whether to leverage the prospective provider’s managed services offering. SMBs need more IT financial resources and access to experienced security engineering talent to manage their email security needs, including 24x7x365 support, incident response, and reporting.

Managed services offerings help SMB and mid-enterprise organizations access resources to help provide coverage for all email security operational requirements.

Why is Future-Proofing Needed to Be Part of Your Email Security Solution Decision?

Future-proofing any component within your cybersecurity architecture is challenging and often rarely achieved. Hackers continue revolutionizing attack patterns while enterprise, education, and government organizations expand their surface through digital transformation strategies. The combination of these two dynamic forces challenges organizations and security providers.

Organizations wanting to future-proof their email security strategy need to consider the following recommendations:

• Execute quarterly assessments against your current email security strategy, leveraging a third party to validate the solution’s capability of stopping simulated zero-day attacks, including AI-generated email phishing, malware, and impostor attacks.
• Based on the assessment output, meet with your current email security provider to determine if your results have surfaced in accounts.
• During the quarterly meeting with the email security provider, review the company’s roadmap plan for additional feature capabilities coming in the current year and any possible new threat intelligence data they can access.
• Review your current SaaS agreement to validate any additional costs because of these new features coming.

By applying these steps, organizations will maintain an awareness of their current and near-future email security capabilities.

Hint: Organizations discovering that their email security provider needs a solid roadmap or visibility of global threats should research alternative solutions.

What Future Capabilities Should Know When Reviewing Alternative Solutions?

Companies considering alternatives to their current email security solutions to help address future threats should consider these factors in the review process:

• Does the current email security provider continue to improve its AI and ML defensive capabilities by innovating its various filtering engines and extending this capability to other protection layers?
• Does the current email security company develop its AI and ML engines internally with its LLM, or is it leveraging a third party?
• What features, including increases in encryption key sizes, additional reporting functions, and integration with other security providers, are currently available under the contract?

What Decision-Making Framework Should Organizations Leverage for Selecting an Alternative Email Security Solution?

Organizations deciding to move forward with replacing their current email security solution should leverage the following decision framework to help with their journey.

• Do the choice of providers you are reviewing have proven offerings that align with your business size?
• Is the choice of providers experienced in your market segment?
• Do these prospective providers offer managed services or have a mature MSP program?
• Do these prospective providers have experience in compliance and privacy mandates that align with your business objectives?
• Do you need the resources to manage their solution after the installation?

Conclusion

Ultimately, deciding to proceed with another email security provider must be more than just cost. This decision framework questionnaire should provide the foundation answers to assist you in making your decision. Having success factors and a strategy before researching alternative solutions is critical to help prevent wasted time and resources.

Organizations need to understand the who and the why, which is essential to helping organizations with a strong starting point in evaluating email security solutions.