Avanan Email Security

Avanan is an enterprise collaboration platform designed for cloud-based email platforms such as Office 365 and Google Workspace. Avanan was founded in New York, 2014, but now sits under the Check Point brand after being acquired in 2021.

The solution provides powerful protection for email messages, leveraging Avanan’s advanced email security platform and Check Point’s malware detection engines. The platform is a market leader in malicious attachment protection and link scanning - this protection extends to collaboration and communication channels such as Slack, Teams, and OneDrive. This solution is highly recommended by Expert Insights for SMBs, large enterprises and MSPs.

Features

Malware and Ransomware Protection

Avanan provides enhanced email protection at the mailbox level, scanning all emails that pass the Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace filters with AI engines to look for indicators of spam or phishing. Emails are also scanned at the gateway level, for multi-layered protection against threats.

Emails are scanned in-real time, with powerful AI algorithms to detect malicious attachments. Key features include time-of-click URL protection, anti-virus and attachment sandboxing which leverages Check Point’s technology. Our testing found these features to be industry leading, with a high effectiveness at blocking malicious attachments and malware attacks.

Collaboration Protection

Avanan’s anti-malware features extend across enterprise applications, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and Box. This protects users against malicious links shared in these channels; a key differentiator of the Avanan solution when compared against other traditional email security providers.

Threat Extraction

Avanan’s threat extraction feature strips email attachments down to safe components, allowing them to be safely downloaded and accessed. This reduces the risk of malware and ransomware infection, while enabling users to view attachments when needed.

Anti-Phishing

Avanan leverages AI technologies to analyze email content to detect phishing attacks, with over 300 indicators of compromise found in typical email message, including verbiage. A clear breakdown is given of why a phishing email was stopped based on these different indicators.

Suspicious emails can be deleted automatically or sent to users with a customizable warning banner according to admin policies. This encourages users to be cautious when interacting with suspicious emails.

Policies

Admins can configure highly granular rules and policies around email deliverability and specific features such as threat extraction. These policies can be applied to all users, specific groups, or individuals, for granular control and easier management.

For larger organizations this is a highly scalable solution, suitable for organizations of all sizes. You can also license the service for a single subset of users, if required.

However, it is important to note that polices and rules have a huge amount of depth, which means initial configuration can be complex. You will need an experienced user to help configure these policies, and some will need to be fine-tuned over time.

Logs and Reports

The platform displays detailed logs and reporting on overall organization posture as well as individual email analysis.

Admins can view comprehensive information around why an email has been blocked, including DKIM signature and sender reputation information via the quarantined email dashboards. These logs go back over one-year, rather than just the last 30-days as is the case with some competitors.

The high-level analytics shown are advanced. Aesthetic and clearly formatted PDF reports can highlight overall email threats and even shadow IT (connected end user accounts) . There is also an in-depth system log panel, which displays admin activities in the system, which is a good feature to have for compliance and ensuring accountability.

Ease Of Use

Deployment

Deployment is very straightforward, and the whole process can take place in just two or three clicks. The system leverages API-based deployment, perfect for O365, and Google Workspace environments.

There is no configuration needed within O365, or Google Workspace platforms themselves, which is not the case with competitors. There are no changes to MX Records or SPF Records required.

Management

Policy management and rule configuration is highly granular, which may be complex to some organizations. The backend portal itself is very easy to use. The platform is well designed, modern and fast, although some rule configurations are not intuitive, especially for non-experts.

Avanan offer a customer success manager on all deals, to perform onboarding and best practices for deployment and Incident Response as a Service (IRaaS) to off load the burden of managing user interactions.

Pricing & Plans

Avanan is available in three tiers, Protect, Advanced Protect and Complete Protect. Each has two prices, one for protecting email only, and one for protecting email and other collaboration channels, like Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Google Drive, Slack, Box and more.

All prices are shown are annual campaigns, per user per month pricing.

Protect

Email Only: $3.60 per user/month

Collaboration: $5.00 per user/month

Advanced Protect

Email Only: $4.60 per user/month

Collaboration: $6.50 per user/month

Complete Protect

Email Only: $6.00 per user/month

Collaboration: $8.50 per user/month

A detailed breakdown of features available in each tier can be seen here: https://www.avanan.com/pricing

Final Verdict

Avanan is a powerful all-in-one security solution for email, online messaging, and collaboration applications. It’s a perfect solution for security Office 365 and Google Workspace, with powerful security and seamless deployment into these environments, with no changes needed to MX or SPF records. While initial deployment is straightforward, we do note that configuring some rules and policies is granular, and therefore can be complex.

Competitor platforms in the email space define themselves as anti-phishing: Avanan provides strong protection against phishing attacks, but this is a much more comprehensive platform. The strong security controls across multiple channels, powerful protection against malware and ransomware go beyond those offered by traditional email security players.

We recognize Avanan as a market leading email security product in terms of effectiveness of security features, depth of reporting and analytics, and granularity of policies and controls. Integration with Check Point’s Harmony platform also means it’s a strong choice for those looking for a wider security stack.

The platform is feature rich, offers powerful security, and protection extends across enterprise collaboration and communication channels. We highly recommend that organizations looking for an all-in-one email and collaboration security stack consider shortlisting Avanan.