In today’s world, fast communication and easy access are something that’s essential in everyone’s life. To ensure this, one of the channels which is much cheaper and more efficient is electronic mails or EMAILS. With the increased use of the same, threats associated with this are also rapidly growing. There comes the introduction of two types of Email security solutions, named as SEGs (Secured Email Gateways) and ICES (Integrated Cloud Email Security), that will safeguard our email gateways against all types of vulnerable threats. SEGs are known for their protection activities for years, whereas ICES are newly introduced email security with more advanced features.
SEGs act as the firewall of email, by ensuring protection for both incoming and outgoing activities. The action involves the processing and filtering of SMTP traffic, in which the MX record has to be changed to the security provider’s gateway. SEGs were actually designed and built for in-house email security solutions, rather than working with cloud servers. But, due to the ever-occurring trend of cloud servers nowadays, SEGs were forced to move to the same cloud-based solutions. As a result of which SEGs lost their security performance level making it not sufficient to identify and analyze all incoming threats coming to the organization. As SEGs were not meant for cloud-based securities, it affected its potential to support and scan all threats at a faster rate on a larger volume. In addition, SEGs couldn’t deliver any new updates for cloud dedicated applications like SaaS, and was also not capable of supporting new features happening in every new update of various applications.
SEGs work in a more efficient manner to protect emails from all types of malicious activities. All the incoming email traffic to the organization is first fed to SEGs, where it actively monitors and evaluates all the stuff and thereby acting as a vault against threats. After successful scanning and filtering, the affected files or spams or any malicious things found are separated and isolated from emails, ensuring a clean and threat-free incoming email traffic to the email service provider and to the end-users.
ICES are much more advanced and efficient email security solutions, which can be termed as “Light SEGs”, in the market. One of the main advantages of ICES is that they are specially designed and integrated for cloud-native applications, and hence could support the new features and updates happening with all SaaS solutions out there. As it’s a cloud-based solution, it can support and identify all possible threats at a much faster rate and in large volumes compared to SEGs. Moreover, ICES are a much-simplified form of email security solutions as there is no need to change MX record instead it ensure protection by the API integration. With ICES integrated technologies email protection is much easier, more efficient, and reliable against all sorts of sophisticated malicious attacks. ICES acts as the main front-line protection against threats by being second in the lineup just after the email service provider. With the advanced features like detection of internal accounts, claw-back functionality, popping up notifications for informing users about the real-time status, ability to move messages into built-in classification mailboxes, and by protecting additional collaboration tools, ICES have become the perfect all-time email security solutions nowadays.
ICES solutions are incorporated in a special manner like directly integrated into the cloud email provider through an API or a Routing Rule/Connector. The majority of the email security solutions are meant for API integration mode, whereas a small number also support Routing Rule or connector integration.
