Key News Highlights

• Cloud-based email products like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace offer far greater security compared to on-premises solutions. 

• Google Workspace, the top-performing email solution, experienced 40% fewer security incidents compared to the category average.

• Mimecast, the top-performing email security solution, had 53% fewer incidents compared to the worst performer in the category.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA,  February 14, 2023 – At-Bay, the insurance provider for the digital age, has released a landmark report which ranks today’s most popular email security solutions and email solutions with the lowest to highest frequencies of cyber incidents related to email over a four year period. From across nearly 40,000 individual policyholders, the two email solutions that performed the best in their category were Mimecast and Google Workspace.

The dataset used for the analysis includes details from the mid-to-small-size businesses that held an At-Bay policy from mid-2018 up until May 2022, and also experienced a security incident where the attack vector included a malicious email or network security attack against a local email server. 

Rotem Iram, Co-founcer and CEO of At-Bay, explains that without a clear analysis of the risk associated with IT choices, businesses are left to make a choice based solely on functionality and are typically unaware of the associated risks. Some software products are more prone to becoming vulnerable to attacks, while others lack security controls that highly impact the risk of the organization.

“In pursuit of our mission to bring clarity to cyber security and empower businesses to embrace technology with confidence, we have created this report to help provide a benchmark for the expected losses that are associated with several of today’s popular email solutions and email security solutions based on our portfolio,” he added.

The Top Findings

Email Security Solutions 

• At-Bay researchers found a gap of 53% between the best- and worst-performing email security solutions when analyzing incident-related claims that included email. 
• The email security solution associated with the lowest number of security incidents involving email – and therefore top performing – is Mimecast.
• On average, At-Bay customers using Mimecast experience 22% fewer incidents compared to the email security solution category average. 
• Other high-performing email security solutions, in order of effectiveness after Mimecast, were Sophos, Intermedia, Appriver, and Proofpoint. 

Email Solutions

• Organizations using cloud-based email products like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace experienced significantly fewer security incidents compared to those that operate an on-premises email infrastructure (e.g., Microsoft Exchange). 
• The email solution that was correlated with the lowest number of security incidents involving email was Google Workspace.
• On average, Google Workspace customers saw about 40% fewer security incidents compared to the email solutions category average. 

As an insurance company, At-Bay is able to offer businesses new intelligence on risk that complements that of the security industry. Pushing beyond the theoretical capabilities and self-serving performance metrics used to market modern software, At-Bay is helping businesses to make better-informed software decisions with statistically significant insights into risk from real-world incidents. The company uses these findings to guide insurance pricing decisions and to incentivize customers to choose better-performing products in order to unlock better rates on their policies.

To read the full report from At-Bay’s Cybersecurity Research Team, go here. 

For a summary of the key findings and recommendations from At-Bay’s GM of Security Services, Adam Tyra,  go here.