Investing in a Cloud Email Security Solution

When you are trying to introduce a security system you will, no doubt, consider Investing in a Cloud email security solution as a smart investment for your organization.

This is a system that can be used to address the constant attacks by phishing, malware and ransomware campaigns. It is one of the most popular security systems as it involves no investment in new hardware, no bandwidth-draining software installation and straightforward configuration.

So this leaves you in a position where you have to choose the best cloud email security solution to implement. When you begin to research this you will quickly discover that there are a great many differences between all of the available solutions. Some will report a 97% spam detection rate while others can boast up to 99.9%. While this might not seem like a great difference when you calculate that your company could register as many as 1,000 emails per day then it would mean that 300 additonals spam emails will land in inboxes of staff members – with a good chance of being successful in infiltrating your servers and data.

In most cases companies opt to configure a two-way cloud-based email security. This is basically a system that involves the scanning of inbound and outbound email traffic. There are a number of reasons for this. Outbound Scanning is conducted to spot any possible infiltration of staff email accounts by hackers. It will stop these email accounts from being used to share outbound emails that have malware to your business contacts in order to conduct business email compromise attacks.

The reason for compromised email accounts being so desirable for hackers is that your business contacts are likely to have marked you as a trusted sender on their security solution. It means that hackers do not have to rely on sending their spam emails from an IP address that is likely to have been included on a global blacklist. If such an attack were permitted to take place the damage to the business reputation of your company may be unrepairable. Worse again, your IP address could be added to a global spam blacklist, meaning that all of the email correspondence sent from your group could end up in the spam folders of the intended recipients.

An outbound spam filter will also prevent an employee from mistakenly sending out malware that is present on a file on an external USB flash drive of a device. This will be discovered by the outbound scanning process and addressed and there is no chance of your IP address being blacklisted.

When you are trying to identify the proper solution for your company you should try and secure the highest possible spam detection rate for your investment. The detection rate will depend on the processes that are used to filter emails by the cloud email solution. The majority of products will offer URIBL and SUBRL filters to review the IP addresses of incoming emails in order to root out those that have been blacklisted previously as being a recognized source of spam. Some will also provide recipient verification protocols and Sender Policy Frameworks, these are processes that identify all emails sent to spoofed and non-existent company email accounts.

SUBRL and URIBL typically can guarantee a minimum spam detection rate of 97%. In order to bring this even higher you should request a greylisting feature. This feature involved all incoming emails being returned to the send with a request for them to be sent again. Authentic users will, usually, send back these emails almost immediately while spammers, operating with overloaded and busy email servers, will not see this request. This means that those IP addresses that failed to send the email a second time can be marked as a source of spam.

You can also use whitelisting to mark trusted users that don’t have to be subjected to greylisting, This process normally results in spam detection rates of up to 99.9%. This mechanism is often used in conjunction.