Email Security as a Service (ESaaS)

How Email Security as a Service Works

An entirely cloud-based software solution that manages your email security requirements, ESaaS aims to provide comprehensive protection against evolving threats. Similar to other “as a service” cloud products, these email security controls are provided over the internet on demand. This offers scalability and flexibility, with security capabilities that match your needs while also eliminating the need for costly on-premises IT resources.

Email as a service integrates with enterprise email providers to automate message inspection and analysis before they reach employee inboxes. Cloud email security controls can include:

• Implementing email authentication protocols to ensure message integrity and verify senders
• Machine learning models that evaluate email language and intent to detect indicators of phishing
• Behavioral analysis to identify unusual login or usage patterns that may indicate account compromise
• Threat intelligence feeds ensure that protections are updated in real time based on global attack data
• IP blocklists and monitoring
• Alerts for suspicious messages and triggers for enhanced security measures
• Sandboxing to execute suspicious attachments in safe environments
• Enhanced, granular reporting capabilities

With a range of security capabilities depending on the specific solution, email security as a service works by minimizing false positives while blocking as many malicious messages as possible through multiple layers of protection.

Outbound messages are also inspected to ensure staff follow security policies that prevent the accidental sharing of sensitive information or compromised accounts from sending malicious content to external parties. Because it is cloud-hosted, ESaaS can also update automatically and scale to match demand without the need for additional hardware or manual software patching.

Email Security as a Service vs Traditional Email Security

While traditional email security technologies still provide some value, they struggle to match cloud-hosted email protections. Secure Email Gateways (SEGs) were the primary email security tool when IT infrastructure was mainly located on-premises. Positioned at the network perimeter, they can filter inbound and outbound traffic and block spam or basic phishing attempts. However, modern workflows and email threats reveal a number of SEG limitations:

• Perimeter-Focused Protection: Monitors for attacks from outside the network, failing to identify internal threats
• Single-Layer of Security: Does not provide multiple layers of security to catch more threats

• Poor Operational Security: SEGs reroute traffic to a proxy server, revealing the security solution in use for attackers to learn and exploit

• Root Domains: It is possible to bypass SEGs by sending emails directly to the email provider’s root domain

In contrast to a traditional SEG-based email security strategy, ESaaS utilizes dynamic detection models and real-time analytics to deliver a comprehensive and future-proof email security solution.

Key differences between email security as a service and traditional email security include:

• Deployment: SEGs require hardware or virtual appliances, while ESaaS delivers email security over the internet alone
• Updates: ESaaS benefits from continuous provider-driven updates. In comparison, SEGs require manual updates
• Scalability: ESaaS scales elastically without the need for additional appliances
• Coverage: ESaaS protects both inbound and outbound emails for modern networks without clear network perimeters. This ensures coverage across all devices and locations, rather than simply monitoring email traffic at a fixed network perimeter

Core Features of Email Security as a Service

A robust ESaaS platform typically provides a suite of integrated features, including:

• Anti-Phishing and Anti-Malware: AI-driven detection for a range of email threats, including spear-phishing, ransomware, and BEC
• Account Takeover Prevention: Continuous monitoring of email behavior and event analysis to identify activity that deviates from the norm, indicating potential account takeover
• Incident Response as a Service (IRaaS): Leverages the vendor’s expertise and the solution’s reporting to provide 24/7 incident response, alleviating the burden on internal IT teams and providing improved subject matter knowledge
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP): Blocks unauthorized sharing of sensitive business data beyond internal security policies and regulatory frameworks
• Encryption: Automatically encrypting emails to protect sensitive data and safeguard confidentiality during transmission
• User Awareness and Training Tools: Some ESaaS platforms include phishing simulations and phishing awareness training modules to strengthen the human layer of email security

Benefits of ESaaS for Enterprises

Adopting email security as a service provides both technical and business benefits:

• Reduced Operational Burden: Hardware appliances require patching, maintenance, and upgrades. ESaaS offloads this to the provider, allowing internal IT teams to focus on other tasks
• Enhanced Security Posture: Real-time detection powered by machine learning and threat intelligence reduces the likelihood of compromise
• Scalability and Flexibility: ESaaS scales seamlessly with business growth, cloud adoption, and remote work, eliminating the need for additional infrastructure
• Cost Efficiency: Moves organizations from capital expenditure (hardware, licenses) to predictable operating expenditure (subscription)
• Regulatory Compliance: Encryption, DLP, and logging all help enterprises meet compliance requirements across industries
• Rapid Deployment: Cloud-native integration makes rollout quick, with little to no disruption for IT teams
• Continuous Improvement: Providers enhance defenses continuously, delivering new features and protections automatically

By combining prevention, detection, and response, ESaaS helps organizations not only block threats but also recover more effectively post-security incidents.