Top 3 Reasons to Replace Your SEG

By manipulating generative AI and other forms of new technology, highly skilled cybercriminals have made defending email an ever-evolving uphill battle. Traditional secure email gateways (SEGs) are no longer an effective means of protection for contemporary enterprises. Costly data breaches have become a frequent headline as hackers are discovering new ways to abuse vulnerabilities in the cloud email environment. Fortunately, there are modern solutions available that can help organizations enhance their email security while cutting down expenses and increasing efficiency.

Here, we discuss the top three reasons organizations should consider replacing their traditional SEG with a solution built to combat modern-day threats.

When it comes to protecting your cloud email environment, traditional SEGs are simply not enough. Legacy email security technology may have been well-equipped for attacks of the past, but modern threat actors have gotten smarter and more innovative. With limited protection from even the most basic attacks, organizations are exposed to an increasing number of new threats like costly and targeted business email compromise (BEC), vendor fraud, malware, and sophisticated phishing emails generated by AI.

Fortunately, there is an alternative: modern solutions designed specifically for defending your email environment from today’s threats. Modern solutions stop all types of advanced threats in real-time with a multi-layered defense system. They also provide detailed visibility into suspicious emails with contextualized information about each suspect message so users can quickly identify signs of potential attack campaigns or malicious content before it reaches their inboxes.

“Before Abnormal, our SEG let almost every executive impersonation email through, and the spam settings either quarantined too many emails or let too much junk through. We needed something that could learn and do more than analyze headers. With Abnormal, anything identified as malicious gets stopped and pulled from all accounts.” — Steve Tieland, Director of Corporate Security Operations, Pegasystems

Replacing your traditional SEG with a modern solution can also help you save on security operations costs. By eliminating redundant software and automating email security operations, you can reduce the labor-intensive burden of managing a legacy solution. This will optimize your security stack and free up resources to focus on other areas of your business. Automation helps by streamlining the process of managing email threats, allowing organizations to more quickly respond to suspicious emails without having to manually scan all incoming mail for malicious content.

Automation also allows organizations to proactively identify and block malicious emails before they reach users' inboxes, reducing the risk of a successful attack or data breach. Additionally, automation reduces overhead costs associated with manual processes such as hardware maintenance and IT support personnel salaries.

“Abnormal provides a new level of precision with insights on email categorization based on the language in the email, whether it’s someone we’ve worked with before, and the request they’re making. It’s been eye-opening compared to the static methods a lot of SEG vendors use.” — Peter Mueller, Systems Programmer, Saskatoon Public Schools

Email security is an ongoing battle, and it's important to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to defending against sophisticated malicious actors. Replacing your traditional SEG with a modern security stack can help protect your cloud email environment from emerging threats. Modern solutions like Abnormal harness advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud-native API-based architectures, and AI-based behavioral anomaly detection to detect and mitigate email attack vectors, including account takeovers and third-party app attacks.

This helps organizations gain valuable insights into how threat actors are exploiting their systems and gather the evidence needed to track down and repair vulnerabilities quickly. In addition, modern solutions feature sophisticated machine learning algorithms which make them more effective at recognizing patterns in data than legacy security technology, which relies heavily on signature-based threat recognition systems alone. This means that they are more adept at detecting new or previously unseen attacks before they cause damage or steal sensitive information from businesses.

“The realization of value was almost immediate—real-time visibility into attacks going on in the environment that are bypassing the traditional defenses. That context allowed ADT to start identifying threat trends while blocking them from employee inboxes.” — Ryan Fritts, CISO, ADT

Replacing your traditional SEG with a modern solution is an essential step towards ensuring maximum protection for your cloud email environment from future emerging threats. By utilizing advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud-native API architectures, and AI-based behavioral anomaly detection, Abnormal can help you ensure that your organization will always have the latest defense against malicious actors.

Ready to see if you can start the process of replacing your SEG? Take our short quiz today!