‘Cloud email security supplement’ uses AI software to protect enterprise collaboration suites like Office 365 from malware, account takeover, and data loss
National Harbor, MD - 18 June 2019 - Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit - Avanan, a pioneer in cloud security, announced the first inline email security solution based fully on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The platform solves for the challenges associated with the rapid adoption of cloud-based collaboration suites, such as Office 365, and the need for simple cloud-to-cloud deployment. To date, these have been only partially addressed by Secure Email Gateways (SEGs), that secure only the email portion of the suite, and Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs), which do not focus on email security.
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As the firm noted in its Global Phish Report, one in 99 corporate emails are phishing, and 25% of these get past conventional security layers. This led to the internal development of Smart Phish™, an artificially-intelligent software trained specifically on cloud email environments, uniquely capable of augmenting existing security layers while remaining invisible to hackers.
In the Avanan platform, cloud-native APIs enable fully in-line protection, meaning that every inbound, outbound, and internal email and file never reaches users or leaves the organization until it’s cleared by the Avanan security stack. This patented approach is the first of its kind, enabling Avanan to protect entire collaboration suites-across email, file sharing, and messaging. This architecture also allows Avanan to install in minutes, even for the largest organizations.
Avanan has been recognized for introducing an open platform that makes industry-standard security technology from numerous vendors available in the cloud with consolidated licensing, able to deploy at enterprise scale. A majority of the nearly 1,000 clients gained since the firm’s 2014 inception rely on Avanan to block phishing, malware, data-leakage and account takeover.
In a recent publication, the “Market Guide for Email Security,” Gartner included Avanan in a burgeoning segment of the cloud security market the firm refers to as “Cloud Email Security Supplements,” which can extend the value of existing investments in SEGs and CASBs, if not replacing some of that functionality altogether.
“Clients, as well as industry analysts such as Gartner, have consistently told us that email-based attacks are the number one gap in Office 365,” said Gil Friedrich, chief executive and founder at Avanan. “The Avanan platform catches what their default and advanced security misses, before it gets to the inbox, and beyond email — across the entire suite,” he added.
Friedrich further explained that by scanning after all other existing security layers, Avanan continuously learns of new hacking methods and uses those as new Indicators of Attack to train its machine learning algorithms to identify what other security layers miss. The prevention capabilities of the platform inspect every configuration change, permissions update, file share, and internal message to identify malicious behavior and compromised accounts within a single threat intelligence interface.
“Default security isn’t enough; advanced threat protection doesn’t cut it; legacy solutions don’t make sense,” said Michael Landewe, head of global strategy at Avanan. “Training our AI specifically on the attacks that have evaded existing security before they make it to the inbox gives Avanan clients unprecedented protection across their collaboration suite,” he concluded.
The announcement came at the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit, where Landewe spoke about key trends across cloud security Monday evening. His comments included a discussion of areas where Avanan is leading innovation, such as pre-inbox filtering, post-delivery protection (“search and destroy” forensics), AI for cloud security, and multi-vendor, multi-layered security — which are also key subjects of Gartner Analysts’ sessions at the Summit.
More information on Avanan at the Summit can be found at www.avanan.com/gartner
Avanan is a cloud security platform. The multi-layer, artificially intelligent solution scales across enterprise architectures and prevents the attacks which bypass conventional security solutions. Avanan deploys in minutes via API to block phishing, malware, data leakage, account takeover, and shadow IT for full-suite cloud applications including Office 365™, G-Suite™, and Slack™. The open platform is also available as a white-label offering within the portfolios of major security vendors. Avanan empowers clients to layer best-of-breed technologies from well-known security components, such as those offered by Check Point, Symantec, Palo Alto and FireEye, and deploy them in a cloud-native fashion.