Ice, Ice Baby…our take on the 2021 Gartner Email Security Market Guide

“Rollin' in my 5.0. With my rag-top down so my hair can blow.”

The immortal words of the great Vanilla Ice were the first thing that popped into my head when I saw the new category name for our approach to email security in the latest Gartner Market Guide for Email Security. We are honored to be in the inaugural class of “ICES” (Integrated Cloud Email Security) companies and look forward to telling our story about our approach to email security. We started this journey as an “IESS” (Integrated Email Security Solution) and are pleased that Gartner has included us as a representative vendor in this newest category.

It is no secret that phishing is the biggest problem faced by security teams at companies of all sizes today. COVID and the rush to work from home (and the stumbling, sort-of-but-maybe-not-but-eventual-return-to-the-office) have created opportunities for the bad guys to exploit. The promise of email going away and everyone using new communications platforms like Teams and Slack hasn’t come to fruition. There was even hope that the cloud email security providers like Microsoft and Google would bake a sufficient level of email security into their products to protect their users, but that hasn’t happened either.

This new report highlights the importance of not just being able to stop spam and bad attachments, but also to identify and remediate advanced attacks that use such tactics as time-detonated URLs and fake login pages. While providing the full suite of capabilities is critical, the authors also stress that the email security technology needs to be fast to install/configure, easy to use and automates away as much of the process of identifying & remediating attacks as possible. In other words, the technology piece is important, but nearly equally important is the ability of that technology to relieve the time burden faced by security practitioners today. We are proud to demonstrate to our prospects how we can take an email security attack resolution from 33 minutes down to milliseconds, all with greater accuracy than before.

“Alright stop. Collaborate and listen.”

We agree with the report that ICES technology adds an important layer of defense when deployed behind a SEG. We also agree that the expensive Microsoft E5 licenses that are needed to deploy Defender for O365 (formerly ATP) are completely unnecessary. Microsoft’s basic EOP (Exchange Online Protection), which is included with every available Microsoft O365 email license, does an adequate job of stopping spam and malicious attachments, and when paired with an ICES technology, provides an outstanding email security solution.

The report spends time on the topic of ICES tools placing inline banners into emails to warn end users of a potential issue with that email. The authors believe that this is a great means of reinforcing security awareness training that the end users have received. We believe that our approach, which combines the advanced phishing detection and remediation with integrated security awareness training, is the best approach to helping end users to make the right decision when dealing with suspicious emails. Our mantra at IRONSCALES is that phishing is a human + machine problem that requires a machine + human solution. That’s why we don’t just tell our customers that our Machine Learning algorithms alone will save them, but rather that the end users also need constant testing and training to remain vigilant against phishing attacks.

So let’s raise a toast to ourselves and our fellow competitors in the ICES category who are providing thousands upon thousands of companies with a fundamentally different and superior approach to finding and remediating the advanced phishing attacks that legacy SEGs (Secure Email Gateways) simply can’t keep up with. Sure, our approaches vary to some degree (our competitors will see the error of their ways someday), but the powerful combination of a cloud-based, API-connected and AI-driven approach to email security is here to stay. We have arrived!

And to paraphrase the most excellent Vanilla Ice one last time: “If there was problem, yo, I’ll solve it. Don’t fear the phish cuz IRONSCALES resolves it.”

To download your copy of the new 2021 Gartner Market Guide for Email Security please click here.

To learn more about IRONSCALES’ award-winning anti-phishing solution, please sign up for a demo today.