What are Email Security Gateways, How Do They Work, and What Can They Offer Your Organization?

Secure Email Gateways provide predelivery protection by blocking email based threats before they reach a mail server, whether on-premise or on Office 365 / G-Suite. They protect businesses from spam, viruses, malware and denial of service attacks. The gateway scans all incoming, outbound and internal email communications, including attachments and URLs for signs of malicious or harmful content.

Email Gateways will also offer protection from social engineering attacks such as phishing, or business email compromise. The gateway can check the domain of incoming emails, as well as scan for suspicious content within the email, to stop harmful content from coming into the network. Emails that have been marked as malicious are quarantined or rejected. Some systems allow the quarantined emails to be accessed by admins if necessary.

Alongside blocking incoming threats, Email Gateways will also scan outgoing content. This can help protect businesses from data loss. Many Email Gateways will provide Email Archiving functionality, which stores emails for legal compliance and data management. They will also provide business with Continuity features, which mean that even if their email network goes down, they will still be able to access their emails. Email Gateways will also provide businesses with a management dashboard and a range of reports and analytics. These give businesses visibility into all email traffic in a network. This is important for businesses to gain insights into their network security.

This category covers cloud based secure email gateways. All of the vendors listed in this comparison are able to protect on-premise mail servers like Exchange and cloud based services such as Office 365 and Google G Suite.

Why Are Secure Email Gateways Important?

Email is the number one target used by hackers to get access to your company’s private data, using attacks like phishing. Email is a weak point within business networks, and methods of attacking email are growing more targeted and sophisticated. Companies from all industries are facing an increasing number of targeted threats such as phishing attacks, ransomware and malicious attachments.

Your first line of defence should be an Email Security Gateway. These solutions protect businesses by blocking malicious content contained in emails and stopping malicious emails from being delivered into the inbox.

How Do Secure Email Gateways Work?

Secure Email Gateways work as a collection of different technologies that work together to block email threats. They work as a firewall for email communications, enforcing a set of rules about what email can enter or leave your email network. They scan all inbound and outbound malicious emails, to stop malicious content from entering your employees inboxes. They also offer features such as virus and malware blocking, spam filtering, content filtering and email archiving.

Secure Email Gateways can be based on multiple cloud based architectures. The products featured in this category are based on virtual appliances, public cloud, or hybrid based architectures. This means that they are all cloud-based, filtering email traffic through a cloud platform. Using a cloud based architecture simplifies deployment and management, with no hardware being needed to install or maintain.

Secure Email Gateways work on a network level, filtering email before they reach inboxes. As such, they don’t impact end-user devices at all. This means that they offer a strong level of protection for email clients on all devices, not just those on the company. This allows you to protect employees working remotely or using their own laptops for work. They also do not impact the performance of these devices.  

Email Security Gateway Features

The key features of a Secure Email Gateway are spam filtering, virus and malware blocking, phishing protection and admin controls and reporting. In more detail:

Top Secure Email Gateway Features:

Spam Filtering:  Spam filtering is the core feature of a Secure Email Gateway. All SEGs use filtering technologies that blocks or quarantines email from known spam email domains. They also use algorithms to detect patterns that commonly show up in spam emails, such as keywords and malicious links, which help block new spam emails from entering email inboxes. They also provide controls for end users to report and block spam emails that make it through the gateway from within their email client.

Virus and Malware Protection:  Secure Email Gateways block viruses and malware from infecting business networks. This works as the SEG filters email with anti-virus technologies that identify and then quarantine messages found with malicious URLs and attachments.

Phishing Protection:  Email gateways provide businesses with a level of protection from phishing attacks. Using anti-fraud technologies, they can spot and prevent sender spoofing, and use domain name validation, to identify and block phishing attacks. The virus and malware protection will also remove emails with malicious URLs and attachments, which will stop emails with links to phishing websites from entering inboxes.

Admin Controls and Reporting:  SEGs give admins control over all email policies and quarantines. They offer admins the ability to manage security over the whole email network, with a centralized admin dashboard. Automated and configurable reports allow admins greater visibility over their email security landscape.

Benefits Of Email Security Gateways

Secure Email Gateways offer businesses multiple benefits. They protect employees from email threats like spam, viruses and phishing attacks, which in turn protects businesses. Employees are biggest attack vector for business networks, and email is a prime target for attackers to reach employees. Having a Secure Email Gateway in place allows businesses to improve security for employees by blocking malicious emails, stopping phishing attacks.

Secure Email Gateways also allow businesses to meet compliance needs. Many Secure Email Gateways offer email archiving and encryption that allow organizations to secure their sensitive data and meet compliance needs by storing copies of email for legal reasons. This means businesses can achieve greater security and meet legal compliance.

Secure Email Gateways provide Business Continuity, which means that all email operations can work as normal even if the email client used by an organization goes down. This works as the Email Gateway provider will provide users access to a cloud based email service in the case of an email client like Office 365 being unavailable.

Who Needs A Secure Email Gateway?

Expert Insights recommends that businesses of all sizes, in all industries should use a Secure Email Gateway. There are multiple different Email Gateway providers, which are aimed at organizations ranging from small teams to multi-thousand user enterprises.

No matter that the size of your organizations, your email communications are a prime target by attackers, and a Secure Email Gateway is a security necessity to protect your business data. Secure Email Gateways offer the most vital level of protection against malicious messages and attachments. Using a Secure Email Gateway will allow all types of organizations to enhance their security.

Find Out More About Secure Email Gateways

If you are interested in finding out more about Secure Email Gateways you can read verified reviews of all of the top Email Gateway platforms from their users right here.