It’s vital that organizations using Google Workspace for email have strong, multi-layered threat protection to defend their users against advanced email attacks. Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite) is one of the major cloud-based office productivity suites used by organizations all over the world. Google Workspace provides a whole range of capabilities, including email, document editing, cloud storage, instant messaging, video conferencing and more.
Cyber-criminals are increasingly targeting email communications with malware, such as ransomware, and advanced social engineering threats. These aim to trick users into giving up financial information or sensitive data such as login credentials, giving hackers access to your business networks. These attacks have made email threats the number one cause of data breaches for organizations.
This guide will cover the top email security solutions for use with Google Workspace. We’ll explore multiple kinds of email security, including secure email gateways, post-delivery protection, email encryption and more. For each solution, we’ll cover top features, recommended customers, pricing and customer reviews to help you make an informed purchasing decision.
Trustify are market leaders in email security, featuring solutions delivered on a software as a service platform which provide both inbound and outbound email security. Trustifi’s Inbound Shield is their comprehensive cloud-based email security solution which acts as an email filter, using sophisticated AI and dynamic engines to scan inbound emails, effectively identifying and blocking email threats including phishing, spoofing and impersonation attempts, business email compromise, and malware.
Inbound Shield also scans for anomalies including links to impersonated websites, requests for money transfers and confidential information, imposters messaging from falsified domains, and attachments containing executable code snippets, SQL injections strings etc.
Trustifi’s Inbound Shield is easy to deploy and works natively with Google Workspace. Trustifi takes a multilayered approach to protection, employing sandbox environments for file and attachment scanning alongside the AI engine for content analysis. The solution provides a quarantined email management system for security teams and administrators, advanced whitelisting and blacklisting capabilities, customizable inbound rules, and can remove potential threats directly from inboxes after the email was already delivered.
Trustifi’s Inbound Shield is well suited to Google Workspace users looking for an all-in-one, easy-to-use solution for encryption and email security. We would recommend the solution to organizations in the healthcare, legal and finance sectors.
IRONSCALES is the fastest growing cloud-based email security company. The solution adds additional layers of security to your business’ Gmail accounts with a self-learning, AI-driven email security platform that continuously detects and remediates advanced threats in milliseconds. Adding IRONSCALES to a GWS environment is quick and easy.
The platform also empowers employees to fight against phishing with integrated email alert banners, report phishing buttons, personalized phishing simulation testing, and advanced security awareness training (SAT) to augment or consolidate your email security stack. IRONSCALES takes a human and machine approach to prevent phishing. The software stops 99% of phishing traffic, before using crowdsourced intelligence to identify the final 1%.
Every user can report suspicious and spam emails using the Report Phishing Button that IRONSCALES automatically adds to employee email clients (browser and mobile). Anytime an email is reported in an IRONSCALES mailbox, that email will be assessed, and can be removed from every other employee’s mailbox—and similar looking emails will also be automatically removed.
When an organization becomes a customer of IRONSCALES, they join the thousands of other security teams in the fight against phishing in practical ways—if one customer flags a phishing attempt in their mailbox, the IRONSCALES AI can automatically remove that email from all other customers’ mailboxes, which reduces chances of others falling victim to attacks. This crowdsourced aspect of IRONSCALES is unique and gives small to large security teams the power (and coverage) to make big impacts against phishing attacks.
IRONSCALES is praised by users for its ease-of-use and intuitive set up and management. The solution quickly integrates with Google Workspace to provide robust security coverage. We recommend IRONSCALES for SMBs and enterprise organizations who need market-leading coverage, and customizable policy options.
Libraesva Email Security is an integrated security solution designed to protect cloud-based email platforms like Google Workspace. By providing protection at both the Gateway and API layers, it efficiently defends against email threats like phishing, email fraud, and business email compromise (BEC).
Libraesva Email Security inspects all internal, inbound, and outbound email traffic to guard organizations from email-borne threats and data leakage. It offers both spam filtering and protection against advanced threats, including phishing, malspam, BEC, and account takeover. The solution utilizes its proprietary sandboxing technologies, URLS and and QuickSand, to scrutinize links and documents for malicious code and evasive behavior, preventing users from visiting unsafe websites and opening harmful files. Libraesva is easy to deploy, customizable, and can be operated either on-premise or in the cloud, ensuring the required level of security is achieved swiftly.
The solution includes the Threat Analysis Portal (TAP), an all-in-one dashboard that provides visibility into email attacks, attachment and URL sandboxing, as well as historical filtering rates. This enables the comparison of your organization’s data with global data, giving insights into potential attacks. In the event that a malicious email reaches a user’s inbox, Libraesva’s Threat Remediation feature allows for fast and straightforward removal of threats from users’ inboxes, either deleting the email permanently or storing it in a secure location for further analysis.
Libraesva Email Security also protects against zero-day attacks and malicious URLs with its QuickSand sandbox defense, scanning and sanitizing or blocking documents before they reach recipients. In addition, the solution offers advanced protection against business email compromise and impersonation attacks using sophisticated algorithms to reduce the likelihood of falling victim to such threats.
Proofpoint Essentials is a market leading email security platform that provides email filtering, encryption, archiving and continuity in a single platform for small and mid-sized organizations. Proofpoint is the world’s largest email security vendor, collecting and analyzing more than 100 billion data points a day from more than 100 million email boxes, 200 million social-media accounts, and 7 million mobile apps. Proofpoint secure more than 50% of the Fortune 100, the top 5 banks globally and 7 of the top 10 global retailers.
Proofpoint Essentials is a powerful email filtering platform that provides granular admin controls and visibility into email threats. Key features include provides spam and phishing protection and detection, URL defense, attachment and dynamic content filtering.
By introducing a host of new features, Proofpoint show their commitment to keeping accounts and users safe. These new features include improved BEC detection, predictive URL scanning, and one-click email pull. BEC detection is enhanced by the Supernova detection engine which improves detection rates by 3 times. URL scanning is enhanced through assessing sender behavior to identify the riskiest links, and ensure they are properly sandboxed. One-click pull allows admin to remove dangerous emails after they have arrived in a user’s mailbox. The new features also include email tags to warn users that an email might not be as genuine as it seems. These new features are included in Proofpoint’s Business+, Advanced+, and Professional+ offerings.
Proofpoint Essentials is well suited for Google Workspace users. The platform is very easy to integrate into Google’s email security platform, and provides powerful protection against phishing attacks, malicious attachments, and malicious URLs. Essentials also helps Google Workspace customers to stay legally compliant with encryption and archiving, managed under one singe dashboard. Proofpoint Essentials is a cost effective email security solution, providing powerful protection at an affordable price for SMBs and MSPs.
Abnormal is a cloud-native email security solution that uses behavioral AI to provide protection against advanced email threats such as social engineering, malware, and detect account compromise. The platform combines inbound email security, vendor email compromise, and supply chain compromise protection to ensure that user inboxes are secured against inbound and internal email threats, like lateral phishing, providing more comprehensive protection than a traditional secure email gateway (SEG).
To protect against inbound email threats, Abnormal’s Inbound Email Protection creates a risk profile for all inbound and internal email communications. Safe emails are delivered securely to the inbox, while graymail and spam are delivered to the user’s promotions folder.
Abnormal’s VendorBase auto-identifies and scores real vendors and partners based upon past email communications, and other signals gathered across the entire enterprise ecosystem. Abnormal maps the internal and cross-functional relationships and captures tribal knowledge of organizational processes. This extensive mapping has allowed Abnormal to create a global, federated supply chain graph of hundreds of thousands of business entities for real-time risk assessment of third parties to stop supply chain compromise attacks.
Abnormal Security’s platform deploys natively in the cloud and offers seamless Google Workspace and via API, meaning that users benefit from Abnormal’s protection without having to turn off the in-built security features offered by Google Workspace. We recommend Abnormal as a powerful Google Workspace email security platform for organizations of all sizes.
Agari is an email security vendor focussed on protection organizations against advanced social engineering attacks such as business email compromise, spear phishing and email identity deception. Agari’s email security solution works inside the inbox, using machine learning systems to analyze email communications and detect malicious content, signs of account compromise and harmful attachments and URLs. Agari also provides a fully-automated DMARC solution that helps to implement email authentication and enforcement to protect your customers and partners from phishing and business email compromise attacks that exploit your brand.
Agari helps protect Google Workspace email environments against advanced email attacks. Agari uses predictive artificial intelligence systems based on analysis of over 2 trillion emails, that can detect and model good and bad email behaviours. By modelling these behaviors, Agari is able to accurately identify and block sophisticated social engineering attacks like account takeover and business email compromise that often evade traditional email security solutions. Agari offers out-of-the-box connectivity to Google Workspace with real-time email threat prevention and granular security controls. Agari works with enterprises and are suited for financial institutions, government bodies and healthcare organizations that need strong levels of protection from advanced social engineering attacks.
Armorblox is a cloud office security provider that provides protection from email security including business email compromise, email phishing, and executive impersonation. Armorblox provides inbound email protection, outbound email protection to prevent data loss, protection for messaging applications, including Slack, and file-sharing protection within Google Workspace. For this reason, Armorblox is a strong solution for organizations looking for wider cloud security to protect their office applications including Google Workspace, alongside a specific email security solution. Armorblox integrates with Google Workspace via API, making it easy to deploy into the Google email environment.
Armorblox uses machine learning and behavioural learning systems to learn who users are, where they fit into the organization, the devices they use, the types of emails they send and more. These identifiers are then used to create a baseline of ‘safe’ email communications, which can then be used to identify signs of social engineering and account compromise, protecting email communications. The system automatically deletes, quarantines or labels email messages which are suspected of being delivered. Armorblox can also identify topics and sensitive data included within email messages to implement a layer of data loss protection, automatically preventing data leakage across email channels.
Avanan is a cloud-based email and cloud security provider that secures email communications. Avanan provides a full suite of security solutions for Google Workspace that provides anti-phishing, malware protection, account takeover protection, data loss prevention and compliance. Avanan scans all incoming, outgoing and internal emails, to identify advanced email threats such as phishing, zero-day malware and ransomware attacks, as well as account take over and data loss protection. Avanan integrates to Google Workspace via API, and provides a range of reports and controls via a cloud-based admin console.
Avanan uses machine learning model to model over 300 indicators per email message to identify and remediate against phishing attacks. This sits behind the default protection Google provides, catching threats that Google misses, and training its AI on those attacks Avanan also provides malware sandboxing and URL protection to block malware and ransomware sent via email. Avanan’s event analysis algorithm detects signs of compromised accounts and remediates the takeover, preventing cyber-criminals from breaching Google Workspace accounts. Avanan also provides email encryption and data loss prevention policies, helping organizations to meet compliance regulations while retaining the benefits of the Google Workspace platform.
Mimecast is a market leading email security vendor, popular for their enterprise-focussed range of email security platforms and services. Mimecast provides a comprehensive range of email security solutions, including email filtering, threat intelligence, DMARC services, security awareness training, cloud archiving and email continuity. Mimecast’s cloud-based secure email gateway defends organizations and employees against sophisticated inbound email threats including spear-phishing, malware and spam, with granular admin policies and multiple threat detection engines and intelligence feeds. Mimecast are a global leader in cloud-based email management and security, securing 36,000 organizations around the world.
Mimecast provides a comprehensive security platform for enterprises using Google Workspace. Mimecast provides powerful protection against spam, malware and phishing attack with their email gateway service. Admins can customize and create granular policies that help to secure both inbound and outbound emails. Mimecast provides time of click URL protection, advanced attachment sandboxing, impersonation and spoofing protection, and browser isolation, baked into one email protection solution. Mimecast’s essential email security, data assurance and continuity platform for Google Workspace helps to protect against advanced attacks, data loss and downtime. Mimecast is a comprehensive email security solution, suited to large organizations looking for powerful email protection.
Virtru Secure Email Encryption protects your Google Workspace email and attachments with secure end-to-end encryption and advanced controls. Virtru is Google’s recommended provider for email encryption, integrating seamlessly into the Google Workspace platform to provide strong protection and advanced controls. Virtru ensure that all email messages and attachments are kept protected at all stages of the email lifecycle, providing secure encryption through email transit and once it has been delivered. Recipients don’t need to create usernames or passwords to view emails or exchange keys, emails can simply be viewed by the correct recipients in the email inbox.
Virtru’s encryption is easy to roll out to users and simple to use. Users are able to manually encrypt emails from directly within the Gmail client. They are also able to set message options, such as disabling forwarding, implementing email watermarks, and setting expiration dates which remove content after a set among of time. Both senders and recipients can read and send encrypted email without the need of a portal or logging into any third party systems, as Virtru manages all keys and exchanges. Virtru also provides full auditing of email communications, allowing users to see where emails and attachments have been shared and conduct threat remediation if needed. Admins can also configure DLP policies that automatically encrypt outgoing email messages containing sensitive data. Virtru is the market leading encryption provider for Google Workspace, and we’d recommend them to all organizations looking for encryption for Gmail messages.
FAQ
What Are The Threats That Your Google Workspace Account?
Google Workspace (formerly G-Suite) is a comprehensive suite of tools for managing your work environment. Included in the suite is Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Docs, Drive, Slides, and many others. There are 14 applications in total. The solution is designed to manage your entire work needs. This utility also makes it a worthwhile target for attackers.
If an attacker can access one of these applications, they may be able to continue their attack laterally.
For instance, if you Gmail account is jeopardised, it may be used as part of a business email compromise (BEC) attack. Your authentic email address will be used to convince other users that the attackers requests are valid. They may send emails to your contacts that install malware or attempt to exploit money from them.
Alternatively, attackers may harvest data from your Sheets, Docs, Slides, and Forms applications. Depending on the type of data that was stolen, attackers could have valuable information on your customers, business plan, or finances. In some cases, your organization could be liable for the data leak. If this data is not copied, it could be edited or deleted, preventing your organization from operating as it should.
Does Google Offer Native Security Features?
Yes. There are several features that Google have included to give you greater control, and peace of mind, over your Google Workspace accounts. These features include:
- Administrator has configuration control to ensure that authentication, asset protection, and operational expectations are met
- Conforms to ISO/IEC 27001, 27017, 27018, SOC 2/3, FedRAMP, PCI DSS
- You, not Google, owns your data
- At-rest and in-transit data encryption
For more information on Google’s native security features, read their white paper here.