Email security has been crucial in helping businesses implement appropriate business policies and achieve set objectives. Without safeguarding the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data passed through email communication, an SME cannot think of business growth or further development.
Email Communication: Growing Opportunities And Threats
By the year 2024, more than half of the world’s population at 4.48 billion users is set to be using email services. The number of sent and received emails has been increasing over the years, as the graph shows below. It creates a massive opportunity for SMEs to target their potential customers by building the right email marketing strategy. However, it also creates an enormous opportunity for malicious actors to exploit vulnerabilities in the email system and foil the email marketing strategy.
Source: Statista
The ever-rising number of threats like ransomware, malware, and spear-phishing makes it difficult for businesses to carry out operations. The following statistics will give the audience an insight into the need for a robust email security service.
- A Cybersecurity Ventures finding predicts that in every 11 seconds, businesses will be attacked by ransomware.
- NetSTAR, a global security solutions provider, reported that there had been a 600% rise in phishing emails in 2020.
- 28% of data breaches involve small businesses, according to the SMB Data Breach Statistics, conducted by Verizon.
- The Financial Conduct Authority in the UK receives 80,000 phishing emails every month.
Such attacks against businesses often result in lapses in email security and render them unable to send or receive emails for an extended period. Therefore, it becomes essential to select a service that offers email security, including phishing and ransomware protection. It keeps the enterprise secure against any attacks and maintains smooth operations.
Essential Features Of A Robust Email Security Service
The correct email security service provides overall protection to email communication and handling email data for an organization. Below listed are some of the main functions that an effective email security service undertakes.
Email Hosting And Email Security
It is very well understood in the cyber world that most of the hosted email services offer no phishing protection from malicious attacks like spear phishing. This protection will be there in the email hosting of the correct service provider. The services must scan emails to detect malicious URLs, attachments, and indicators of fraudulent messages. It will keep an organization safe from data breaches by utilizing phishing protection. The email hosting service should include anti-phishing services and anti-spam filtering not only on incoming mails but also on all outbound mails.
The service should provide advanced protection methods like ‘Link Click Protection‘ to protect from spear-phishing and other email security threats. Email security has been a hot topic in the US and around the world recently, and rightly so. Google has started notifying users whenever they receive a non-TLS encrypted message in their inbox. By keeping email security a priority, the email hosting service should also provide TLS encryption on their services.
Outbound SMTP
An outbound SMTP becomes extremely important due to the limitations of peer-to-peer email service providers. The outbound SMTP comes into play to prevent the emails from reaching the recipient’s spam or junk folder. An outbound SMTP’s primary benefit is that it protects email communication against malware, increasing email security. It also increases the deliverability in email marketing, where the organization wants to reach all of its target audience.
Email Security During Tenant To Tenant Migration
During tenant to tenant migration, one will have to move data from the old tenant to the new one. The process might turn out to be a complicated situation and pose significant email security and email hosting threats even though cloud providers have sophisticated ways of creating backups of the emails.
During migration, one has to remove the old tenant’s domain and attach it to the new one. It takes a few days before one can re-access the data. Most of the data disasters concerning email security and email hosting take place during this stage of transition. Even if one is only migrating between Office 365 tenants, the data remains at risk.
Therefore, choosing an email security service will be better as it automates the entire tenant to tenant migration to reduce the downtime. However, the service should also include an MX backup to keep the system running during the migration.
MX Backup
An efficient email security service must protect data through MX backup during any mishap. An MX backup service is exceptionally vital during a server failure, server reboot, connection outage, and upgrades. Even when the system is down due to any of the above reasons, email access will be available. It is also beneficial during migration. During the migration process, a prevailing email security threat is the loss of access to the data. Users cannot access any information until the migration is completed. At this time, a good MX backup will allow an organization to access the data.
An email security service that provides all of the above services will be the right choice for any SME to safeguard its digital communication from any malicious intrusions. With a robust infrastructure in place, SMEs can implement an excellent email security strategy to protect critical data.