I am following the email market closely since many years and there have been recent changes just to name a few :
-Mimecast's acquisition of Dutch DMARC Analyzer to strengthen their email portfolio.
-Proofpoint being sold to a private equity company which is strong in the security space.
-Agari being acquired by HelpSystems , another large security player.
There is a lot movement in the email security space. Many news players like Greathorn (www.greathorn.com), Area1Security (www.area1security.com) come up with new and innovative solutions and product offerings. Customers extend their MS licensing and get suddenly entitled to use Office365 ATP and Defender to replace some of the previous email security solutions they had, some with good some with bad results.
None of the less, change can be good for the customers and the software providers. While some solutions provide clear advantages over others, they all serve the same purpose to limit the exposure of your employees to email compromise and malware.
Looking back at the industry I can say clearly say that some vendors are lacking an overall strategy on what should come next in the email security space. While I love how stable some email security platform, solutions and vendors are, I still see an big issue with acquisitions and related product integrations. This takes time and effort and is in many cases underestimated.
While vendors try to unify the admin and end user experience the result is at best medicore. Players like Proofpoint and even Splunk still have different user experience for some of their core products.
A change in ownership is also opportunity and I hope for Agari and HelpSystems that they can share some of the security code base amongst their product lines. Agari has the advantage of a large OEM deal with Cisco to resell the products but for me it is time now to look at ESG Next. Most vendors in this space have not communicated a clear new roadmap with new features or are holding back on new improvements since they are still fighting the integration game.
It is time now to look beyond what is available today on the market and leverage key new standards features like DANE, TLSA , TLS v.1.3, ARC and BIMI. What does it help if we create new standards but don't get the required solutions to support them ?
Why do I still need a PhD in email ,security, OS, SIEM etc to make it work nicely together ? Why is integration across multiple products and vendors so difficult ? Why does no email security vendor support full automation of the whole email life cycle so we can do more then just reacting but fully automate the exception process (SOAR).
I hope the Agari acquisition by Helpsystem will allow for a redesign of some key elements but other vendors like Cisco and others are in the same situation. The longer the key ESG vendors take, the easier it will be for Microsoft to "just convert customers over to their platform".
Comments