Learn about the top methods and criteria for evaluating email security software and implementing it in your company. Using a series of checks, email security gateways ensure that no malicious or unwanted material is being sent or received. There is potential for bidirectional tracking here. Malware, phishing attacks, and spam are just some of the threats that these programmes aim to neutralise or contain. On the other hand, several of them include safeguards against data loss and encrypted outgoing email.
Hardware and software options for email gateway security exist in plenty, making it possible to meet the needs of almost any business. Nevertheless, with so many options out there, settling on a single service or item might seem like an uphill battle. As part of an email security gateway evaluation, a company should create a set of criteria, such as a list of questions, to respond about each product under consideration. There are methods for doing this range from basic research to direct communication with suppliers to product testing.
Everything that is discussed in this article should be included as part of any analysis of an email security gateway.
How advanced are the rudimentary security features in terms of technology?
Every email gateway worth its salt will safeguard the business against phishing, spam, and malware-infected messages. Yet, this does not mean that anti-virus, anti-spam, and anti-phishing measures are all that an email security gateway solution has to provide. Antimalware measures from a previous generation are not as helpful in protecting modern technology from threats.
Instead, businesses should look at more advanced virus protection, spam filtering, and phishing protection software. Malware detection, for example, should use sandboxing and other sorts of advanced analysis to examine files for any malicious behaviour. Signature-based techniques, like antivirus signatures, are no longer sufficient for identifying malware. Choosing the email dlp is essential here.
Using the Providers
Providers of email security gateways often include sandboxing and other advanced approaches in their premium membership packages.
In a perfect world, even the most basic security procedures would make use of the most current threat data. The term “threat intelligence” is used to describe data collected by a security company on existing and emerging dangers, such as the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of attacking hosts or the web addresses of malicious domains.
Using threat intelligence services and sophisticated detection methods, an email security gateway may be significantly more successful at identifying malicious emails if the threat information is maintained up to current at all times, for example, updated every few minutes. This is assuming that threat information is always up-to-date.
Do email security gateways provide any further protections?
The security measures detailed in the preceding section may be the extent of the protections offered by certain gateways. Conversely, there is a growing trend for gateways to include supplemental security features relating to email. Data loss prevention (DLP) and email encryption features are fundamental to these offerings.
Conclusion
Many businesses, especially larger ones, do not need to encrypt their emails or implement corporate DLP since they already have these capabilities. The reason for this is because these skills are already present inside the organisation. If your firm does not currently have DLP and email encryption capabilities, you may find that integrating them into an email security gateway is a quick and easy method to implement them. Nonetheless, it’s not uncommon to have to pay more for this kind of enhancement.