Cloud adoption is now the norm for most enterprises—and for good reason. Migrating to the cloud enables greater collaboration, more scalable data storage, and reduced operational costs compared to traditional on-premises infrastructure. Chances are that your organization is already benefiting from these cloud advantages.
However, while the cloud has transformed how businesses operate, it also introduces new challenges—especially in email security. Cloud environments come with their own vulnerabilities, and relying solely on Microsoft’s native or add-on security features often falls short. In fact, Gartner reports that Microsoft fails to detect and remediate up to 20% of advanced email threats. That’s why Gartner recommends a multi-tiered approach to cloud email security to ensure comprehensive protection.
Has Your Email Security Kept Up with Your Capabilities?
Email remains one of the most exploited vectors for cyberattacks. According to the 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), phishing, stolen credentials, and vulnerability exploitation continue to be the top three methods attackers use to infiltrate organizations. Despite advances in security technologies, email remains a high-risk channel.
Traditionally, secure email gateways (SEGs) have served as the frontline defense against email-based threats. However, as organizations increasingly adopt cloud-native environments like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, the limitations of SEGs and native email security tools are becoming more apparent. These legacy approaches often struggle to detect and block today’s more advanced, identity-based threats.
Business email compromise (BEC) and phishing remain dominant across the threat landscape. BEC, in particular, poses a unique challenge in that these emails typically lack malicious links or attachments, making them difficult for conventional security tools to identify. Instead, BEC relies on sophisticated social engineering, often using spoofed or lookalike domains that appear legitimate even to trained users and to your email security system.
According to the FBI’s 2023 Internet Crime Report, BEC continues to be one of the costliest cybercrimes, with reported losses exceeding $2.9 billion in 2023 alone, a significant increase from previous years. These attacks are not only growing in frequency but also in sophistication, targeting individuals across finance, HR, and executive leadership.
Why Frontline Email Security Isn’t Enough
Staying ahead of email threats can feel like a never-ending race. Just when your organization feels secure, new, more sophisticated attacks emerge, forcing you to invest in additional layers of protection across multiple tools and environments. The result? A complex, fragmented security posture that's difficult to manage and still vulnerable.
The reality is that frontline email security solutions — especially those built into cloud platforms — were never designed to handle today’s highly targeted, socially engineered attacks like BEC and impersonation scams.
According to Fortra’s 2023 Email Security Report, the leading cloud email provider failed to detect 625 threats per 1,000 users each year. That’s hundreds of dangerous emails slipping through, putting users and the organization at risk.
Fortra Cloud Email Protection
Fortra Cloud Email Protection brings together a powerful suite of capabilities including AI and machine learning-based detection, real-time threat intelligence, automated remediation, and integrated security awareness training.
Built on a foundation of advanced data science, global inbox threat intelligence, and automated response, Fortra Cloud Email Protection is the only integrated, cloud-native platform that unifies these elements to stop threats that routinely bypass traditional and frontline defenses.
Data Science & AI: Leveraging machine learning, large language models, and neural networks, the platform proactively detects and blocks previously unknown threats—before they reach user inboxes.
Global Inbox Threat Intelligence: Crowdsourced from millions of inboxes worldwide, this intelligence enables the system to identify and neutralize new attack campaigns as they emerge in real time.
Email Threat Operations: Our dedicated threat ops team analyzes patterns across vast datasets to engineer countermeasures against novel and evolving attack techniques.
Continuous Detection & Response: At enterprise scale, Cloud Email Protection provides ongoing analysis and remediation—ensuring faster, smarter defense without adding operational burden.
Fortra’s distinctive product portfolio features capabilities like AI/ML-driven advanced detection, threat intelligence, security awareness training and much more. Learn more about Fortra Cloud Email Protection.