Abstract
Today, email is widely used by individuals and organizations for a variety of purposes to exchange information. It is an essential application in network communications, particularly important for businesses, healthcare, and educational sectors, which rely on it to transmit critical data such as business records, patient information, and more. Email enables easy transfer of data and messages across the internet or internal networks, allowing communication to occur between senders and recipients. It also supports functions like receiving, replying, storing, forwarding, and distributing messages. These capabilities have made email the primary method of official communication in many organizations.
In addition to business use, email is also prevalent for personal communication, accessible via a wide range of compatible software clients and web browsers. Given its widespread adoption, email has become both a primary target for cyberattacks and a key medium through which these attacks occur, making it crucial to secure both the sending and receiving ends.
For enterprises, email security is often enhanced through various service models. In a fully outsourced model, the service provider manages all security aspects, including the monitoring of email-based threats such as spam, phishing, and malware, and provides the email user interface (UI). Alternatively, in an enterprise augmentation model, an organization’s existing on-premise email system is supplemented with additional cloud-based services and features. This paper explores important topics such as identity federation and data loss prevention, and outlines best practices for evaluating, implementing, and using cloud-based email security services.
The target audience for this paper includes both providers of email security services and their consumers or buyers. Both groups need to understand the key features of email security services, plan for their implementation, and learn how these features can effectively address the various threats that emails face.