What is Secure Email Gateway?

A secure email gateway is essential to protecting your business from malicious content contained within emails by preventing them from reaching their intended recipient. By placing malicious emails into quarantine or blocking the sender, a secure email gateway significantly reduces the number of successful compromises of user credentials, email hosts and sensitive company data.

One of the apps business owners will say they cannot do without is their email app. In the digital age, there is hardly any business that can survive without it. While email is the number one method of communication for most organizations both internally and externally with clients, it is also the number one method cybercriminals use to launch attacks on organizations. This calls for an extra layer of security and that is exactly what secure email gateway offers.  Attacks carried out through email include Phishing attacks, Malicious attachments, and Ransomware attacks.

A secure email gateway offers technologies that protect against email attacks. It is like a firewall that blocks emails that go in and out of an organization. The following are the four major security features that a secure email gateway offers.

Features of Secure Email Gateway

VIRUS & MALWARE BLOCKING

This is done using threat intelligence which is the threat patterns and behaviors. With up-to-date information about this, email gateway can block emails coming in with such patterns thereby making it impossible to deliver payloads.

SPAM FILTERING

Spam is mostly received from unknown senders except on rare occasions where emails from known senders drop in spam. Spam filtering detects patterns used commonly by spammers such as keywords and links that take the recipient to malicious site if clicked.

CONTENT FILTERING

This helps to ensure that emails sent by users within the organization do not contain specific sensitive documents. Such documents are automatically blocked when they are being sent.

EMAIL ARCHIVING

This is important especially for organizations where compliance is taken seriously. Keeping email for reference is important and a secure email can help achieve this. With email archiving, users cannot deny sending a particular email.

You would agree that a secure email gateway is extremely important for every organization.

About Author

Omolara Sanni is a Cybersecurity Analyst at a Security Operations Center . She is tech and information security enthusiast .Omolara is also a budding content writer.