In the early 2000s, Secure Email Gateways (SEGs) were introduced to deal with a growing need around the routing and filtering of email. While SEGs were successful at their mission for many years, their fundamental design has made it impossible for them to keep pace as phishing threats rapidly grow in scope and sophistication.

Continuously updating manual rulesets and policies that were originally built for on-prem servers only inflates the amount of time and effort involved in maintaining a SEG. This has resulted in an increase in cost and complexity while still falling short of catching the most dangerous threats, such as business email compromise (BEC) attacks.

As organizations continue to adopt Microsoft 365 to enhance communication and collaboration for their hybrid workforce, it is crucial to take advantage of Microsoft's native security features while integrating complementary, machine learning-based solutions to automatically block and isolate the most dangerous threats. This strategy not only significantly reduces phishing risk, but also simplifies workflows, minimizing the time and effort needed for ongoing security management.

Analysts agree that consolidating capabilities to minimize overlapping functionality is helping organizations reduce cost and complexity. However, they also advise organizations to carefully assess native features to ensure they satisfy all use cases. As Microsoft continues to build out its essential email security features, the growing overlap with SEGs has given organizations an opportunity to streamline security operations by leveraging capabilities already included in their E3 or E5 license.

This shift enables organizations to eliminate complex and costly SEG deployments, redirecting a fraction of that budget to integrate lightweight solutions that effectively address the most dangerous phishing threats. Cloudflare Email Security provides an integrated, low-touch solution that augments Microsoft 365 using machine learning threat analysis to automate the detection of BEC and multi-channel attacks.
