Part 2 – the impact of the changing threat landscape.
In the first part of this 3-part blog we looked at changes in the cloud security industry and how mergers and acquisitions and vendors’ changing strategies have impacted their customers. In part 2 we will look at how the threat landscape has changed and what this means to those organisations that rely on a cloud email and web security vendor.
Early entrants into the SaaS email security market quickly realised that they were in a unique position to offer better protection than their competitors that were producing on-premises products. Because they were protecting, in some cases, tens of thousands of customers, they had visibility of the end-to-end flow of millions of emails. This meant they had a significant amount of security intelligence that they could use to identify suspicious emails and protect against zero-day threats.
Today it is common for email and web security vendors to maintain large intelligence networks which gather data from honeypots and probes. On-premises products are fed with intelligence gathered from these networks so that they can offer similar levels of protection to their cloud security counterparts. However, simply having a lot of data from malicious emails and web content is not sufficient, it also needs to be of the correct quality and you need the tools and security experts to analyse it and understand what to do as a result of it.
Symantec has established some of the most comprehensive sources of Internet threat data in the world through the Symantec Global Intelligence Network. This is made up of approximately 69 million attack sensors and records thousands of events per second, monitoring threat activity in over 157 countries. Spam, phishing, and malware data is captured through a variety of sources. Over 8 billion email messages and more than 1.4 billion Web requests are processed each day across 15 data centers.
These resources give Symantec’s analysts unparalleled sources of data with which to identify, analyse, and provide informed commentary on emerging trends in attacks, malicious code activity, phishing, and spam. The result is the annual Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, which gives enterprises and small businesses the essential information to secure their systems effectively now and into the future.
Access the report to see how the changing threat landscape impacts email and web security:
In the next part of this blog on 27 May we will look at what organisations should look for when choosing a SaaS email and web security solution.