Why Multi-Layered Email Protection Is Important for Businesses Of All Sizes

Multi-Layered protection is hugely important for businesses to protect their email networks from attacks. With businesses moving to cloud based email platforms like Office 365 and Gmail, they are facing new email threats. This includes sophisticated attacks, like phishing and business email compromise. But they are also still facing the same threats as they have in the past with spam and malware coming through email networks.

EdgeWave are one of the top vendors offering multi-layered protection against both of these email threats. John Randall, the Vice President of Product Management at EdgeWave, tells me that they offer “a full email security platform.”

The EdgeWave Platform

Randall describes three levels of defence that EdgeWave offers to protect businesses from attacks. The first is the traditional Email Security Gateway. “This technology has been around for 20 plus years,” Randall says. “And we’ve learnt a lot being in that space for so long.”

The second is their post-delivery protection platform. This is the advanced new technology that helps businesses using Office 365 protect themselves against sophisticated attacks like Business Email Compromise.

“Two years ago, we decided to take our understanding and knowledge of email security and apply it to the new email security threats at the inbox level.” For this component, users can report suspicious messages to EdgeWave for them to classify. They will then quarantine this message.  This is their inbox detection platform, known as ThreatTest.

The final layer of protection EdgeWave offer is their incident response component. This component looks for all the copies of harmful emails that users have reported and removes them as well.

Randall tells me that all of these layers are vital. “Gateways are entirely important.” He explains, “But, they’ll never be 100% effective. So, you need the inbox protection and response.”

Despite not being the most effective way to stop phishing threats, it’s clear that Gateway technology is not going away anytime soon, at least in terms of the EdgeWave platform.

“We have a lot of customers with phishing problems who come to us about the inbox detection,” Randall explains. “But they end up also asking about the gateway.”

Phishing attacks

Phishing attacks are one of the key issues facing business at the moment.

“Phishing is the top issue. In particular the messages with no content.” Randall explains. “When there’s a malicious URL or attachment, it can help gateways to filter phishing attacks. But, when phishing messages are just ten words of plain text, what can the gateway do?”

Randall argues this is why the Incident Response element is so important.

“It’s vital,” he says, “even if you have it and if it doesn’t catch much, it only takes once to lose data.”

Is multi-layered protection important for businesses of all sizes?

Some small business may think that multi-layered protection is something they don’t need. We’ve been told by other industry leaders that up to 80% of businesses using O365 may have no extra email security whatsoever.

Randall argues that multi-layered security is something that is needed by all businesses. “We see threats for all industries and organizations of all sizes,” he says. “They all say the same thing, they all have the same problems.”

How is the EdgeWave Platform different to other Post-Delivery Protection vendors?

Expert Insights has identified a growing number of vendors in the market of providing post-delivery protection to give businesses protection from advanced email threats like phishing.

There’s a lot of choice for customers who are dealing with phishing attacks, and so we asked Randall what made the EdgeWave platform better than these other vendors.

“Direct feedback from our customers says that the best feature of our platform is that we do everything automatically. If end users submit a message, we get back to them in five minutes and are notified if we quarantine a message.”

“The platform gives admins the comfort knowing that it’s done, the problem has been taken away it’s out of the inbox.”

Security Awareness Training as part of multi-layered security

EdgeWave’s platform offers users a simple way to report phishing emails which promises to remove them from an organisation entirely if they are deemed to be malicious.

This seems to remove, or at least reduce the need for something like Security Awareness Training, which aims to teach users to be more aware about security concerns.

If end users can simply hit a button in Outlook to get a phishing email removed, do they still need security awareness training?

“Security awareness training is not irrelevant,” Randall says. “There’s always value to training. It is much like a gateway in that you need to have the gateway, but it’s not your saviour on its own.”

“It goes back to that idea of the multi-layered approach. You have to have in-depth email defence today, there’s just too much evidence to the contrary. And so that’s where our platform comes in.”

To read more about the EdgeWave ThreatTest Platform, you can read our full review here:

EdgeWave Review