Email Security Gateway Best Practices

Businesses rely on email security gateways to prevent the distribution of emails that violate company policy and contain malicious content such as phishing attacks, spam, and malware.

Typically, the main task for this type of system is to block or quarantine both inbound and outbound emails containing malicious content. Email security gateways can be deployed as a software platform in your mail server’s network or as a remote service - in the private or public cloud.

The benefits of email security gateways go beyond the essential email security functions; they also compensate for weak partner security, protecting all your business relationships against malware. Some systems go beyond security and also focus on Email control, by offering data loss prevention and other delivery rules. Email Security Gateways are also responsible for protecting the integrity of emails in transit and ensuring its deliverability to destination email servers. 

When you invest in an email security gateway product, you should know that there are ways to maximize their features. Here are three email security gateway best practices for choosing the right one for your organization: 

Threat Intelligence

The email threats can be better perceived if the security system possesses knowledge of other interconnected security aspects. For instance, knowing the reputation and previous behavior of the domains sending the emails, or knowing how do certain Spam sending malware behaviors, is very helpful to accurately discover threats.

The email security gateway product you select should have up-to-date threat intelligence. This service gathers raw data on existing and emerging threats, including collecting indicators from other spam and malware emails, and then it analyzes and correlates the data into useable information to help to detect the next malicious email, preferably as soon as this happens.

Sandboxing

Hackers have evolved. It’s no longer enough to rely on signature-based techniques for malware detection. For sophisticated antispam, antivirus, and anti-phishing technologies, malware detection should include sandboxing techniques.

Experts will argue that email security is incomplete without sandboxing technology as it scans emails for malicious content before they even reach the inbox. Suspicious attachments are sent to a virtual “sandbox” where it is safe to analyze them. If it contains any harmful links or questionable install commands, they are kept out of the inbox entirely. 

Customizability

Ease-of-use should be a priority; however, customizability should not be overlooked. Investing in an email security gateway should involve the ability to customize features, optimizing the management process through customized user and domain management, dashboards, helpdesk, reporting, and alerts.

Detection of threats should be as advanced as possible. And it’s unquestionably that most attacks today are email-based; therefore, an email security gateway is beneficial for organizations of all sizes, whether they host their email services or outsource them.

At AnubisNetworks, we push organizations to ensure that their email ecosystem is protected. Ask us about our robust email security system that will integrate seamlessly with the other components of your existing infrastructure.