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At-Bay Reveals Google Workspace Customers Experience 40% Fewer Email Security Incidents Than Average
February 2023 by At-Bay
At-Bay has released a landmark report which ranks today’s most popular email security solutions and email solutions with the lowest to highest frequencies of cyber incidents related to email over a four year period. From across nearly 40,000 individual policyholders, the two email solutions that performed the best in their category were Mimecast and Google Workspace.
We’re seeing a real shift in the fight against cybersecurity. President Biden is planning to sign a “National Cybersecurity Strategy” bill, which differs significantly from previous papers in that it imposes mandatory regulations on a wide swath of American industries. Historically, security governance and government regulations neglected the demands derived as a result of mass tech adoption over the last two decades, resulting in increased threats and vulnerabilities for businesses of all sizes and backgrounds.
At-Bay was created by industry veterans to better evaluate what drives cyber risk, examine security adoption, and explain how regulators can create the most effective policies. Knowing a change needed to occur, At-Bay today launched its inaugural, first-of-its-kind report to evaluate the effectiveness of email security solutions in preventing security accidents. While only one part of the large security pie, email is one of the most pervasive technologies used by organizations (from comms to file storage to financial transactions) and it remains one of the most vulnerable.
Details: The report analyzed claims data from 40,000 small to mid-sized businesses in the US over a 4-year period. Key insights:
• The gap between the best and the worst email security solutions is 53%, and the email security solution associated with the lowest number of security incidents involving email is Mimecast.
• Unsurprisingly, organizations using cloud-based email solutions experience significantly fewer security incidents compared to those that operate an on-premises email infrastructure, however, the native security capabilities of Google Workspace was correlated with a significantly lower frequency of risk comparative to the others in their category - this was as much as 40%.
• A typical company could have saved as much as 50% on their premium prices if they used the best email solution or email security solution in their category (i.e., Mimecast or Google Workspace) last year.
The dataset used for the analysis includes details from the mid-to-small-size businesses that held an At-Bay policy from mid-2018 up until May 2022, and also experienced a security incident where the attack vector included a malicious email or network security attack against a local email server.
Rotem Iram, Co-founder and CEO of At-Bay, explains that without a clear analysis of the risk associated with IT choices, businesses are left to make a choice based solely on functionality and are typically unaware of the associated risks. Some software products are more prone to becoming vulnerable to attacks, while others lack security controls that highly impact the risk of the organization.
“In pursuit of our mission to bring clarity to cyber security and empower businesses to embrace technology with confidence, we have created this report to help provide a benchmark for the expected losses that are associated with several of today’s popular email solutions and email security solutions based on our portfolio,” he added.
The Top Findings
Email Security Solutions
At-Bay researchers found a gap of 53% between the best- and worst-performing email security solutions when analyzing incident-related claims that included email.
The email security solution associated with the lowest number of security incidents involving email - and therefore top performing - is Mimecast.
On average, At-Bay customers using Mimecast experience 22% fewer incidents compared to the email security solution category average.
Other high-performing email security solutions, in order of effectiveness after Mimecast, were Sophos, Intermedia, Appriver, and Proofpoint.
Email Solutions
Organizations using cloud-based email products like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace experienced significantly fewer security incidents compared to those that operate an on-premises email infrastructure (e.g., Microsoft Exchange).
The email solution that was correlated with the lowest number of security incidents involving email was Google Workspace.
On average, Google Workspace customers saw about 40% fewer security incidents compared to the email solutions category average.
As an insurance company, At-Bay is able to offer businesses new intelligence on risk that complements that of the security industry. Pushing beyond the theoretical capabilities and self-serving performance metrics used to market modern software, At-Bay is helping businesses to make better-informed software decisions with statistically significant insights into risk from real-world incidents. The company uses these findings to guide insurance pricing decisions and to incentivize customers to choose better-performing products in order to unlock better rates on their policies.
Methodology
At-Bay’s study, collected over a four-year period, analyzed incident samples from around 40,000 small to medium-sized businesses in order to provide a ranked, statistically significant list of email security providers based on frequency of incidents. As part of its study, At-Bay monitored any email-related incident claims, as well as claims in which email was attributed as a factor in any manner between mid-2018 and May 2022
