The more and more we are becoming dependent on the clouds and the Internet, the risk of data breaches and cyber threats is rising. Many incidents occur in the cloud, such as stealing information without the knowledge or access of the system owner, ransomware attacks, and more. There are many techniques that cyber attackers can practice to breach the data, such as phishing, malware, etc.
According to the Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), phishing techniques are the most common method attackers practice to cause ransomware.
Today, many companies use cloud-based email systems to transfer sensitive data from one location to the other over a network and support distributed or remote workforce. Hence, there is an immediate need for an email security solution that adds protection to your cloud-based email systems. As a result, your enterprise can focus more on working and growing business rather than worrying about cyberattacks.
Phishing, Malware, Ransomware, and using Malicious Links are a few common email threats. Cybercriminals use these techniques to trick a recipient and blackmail them to transfer sensitive information or money in exchange.
Protecting your email accounts has become crucial for every modern organization as most of the sensitive data is shared through email. Hence, to enhance your cloud email security, we have shortlisted a few cloud email security tools that can be highly advantageous for your enterprise.
Here we will discuss Area 1 Security, its features, pricing plans, benefits, and drawbacks. Further, we will highlight a few alternatives to Area 1 Security that one can switch to as per the need and budget.
What is Area 1 Security?
Area 1 Security is one of the best cloud email security solutions that follow the preemptive concept and provide continuous security to your accounts. The main motto of the application is to protect your accounts from phishing attacks that are the main cause of data breaches.
Features of Area 1 Security
- Provides comprehensive, contextual, and continuous security
- Easy to integrate cloud email security solution
- Protection to cloud users against phishing
- Works as a layer of defense
- Improves signals and reduces noise
- Flexible deployment options
- Analyze end-user reports faster
- Improves incident response times
- Message sentiment analysis
- Conversational context analysis
- Allows analysis of phishing campaigns before they damage the data
- Secures email and web gateways
- Prevents business email compromise
- Follows a unique machine and human approach
If you wish to protect your data against malware, ransomware, or advanced threats, we recommend investing in Area 1 Security tool. The tool has gained a lot of popularity over the past years and enables businesses to discover and eliminate these techniques before they cause any damage.
No doubt, there are many tools and applications available online that provide security to email but with Area 1’s cloud-native SaaS solution you can prevent one-third more phishing attacks in comparison to other email gateways and defense systems.
Also, Area 1 Security offers flexible deployment options and quick setup. Further, the Cloudflare security system requires you to spend minimum time on phishing incident response and remediation compared to other cloud email suites.
It helps identify malicious phishing campaigns faster by delivering comprehensive, contextual, and continuous email security features.
Phishing attacks are common for organizations of all sizes. Rather than struggling with the existing defense system, it is best to invest in a highly focused and sophisticated tool that can prevent massive financial damage and data loss.
Pros:
- Helps protect the digital business by managing security risk
- Protects against theft of customer or sensitive data
- Saves from expensive legal and regulatory compliance issues
- Helps maintain the company’s competitiveness and reputation by stopping active fraud
- Prevents financial loss
- Ensures business continuity by enabling employees to focus more on the company business and customers rather than attackers
- Stops phishing attackers from reaching inboxes and blocks them
- Enables businesses to analyze and get access to attacker infrastructure knowledge
- Blocks existing unseen malicious payloads and links before they launch
- Provides continuous automatic updates
- Takes about five minutes to set up Area 1 Security
- Users do not have to spend more time on phishing incident response and remediation
- Helps streamline routine processes and reduces manual efforts
Cons:
- API is essential for an end-to-end reporting experience that requires improvement
- Visualizing GSuite/O365 quarantine from the console is not possible
Pricing and Plans
Area 1 Security has turned out to be a great solution for most businesses as it helps minimize cybersecurity risk. It supports a Pay-per-Phish pricing plan, i.e., with Area 1 Security, you only need to pay for the phish the solution catches.
In simple terms, the cost is calculated based on the results they prove. This particular tool is highly effective and provides precise details about the phish we catch in the audit report. Also, on average, the tool preempts phish 24 days before starting the campaign.
Further, under the pricing plan, you do not have to pay any additional amount for Suspicious, Spam, and Spoof Verdicts.
Website Link: https://www.area1security.com/
Best Area 1 Security Alternatives
There are multiple email security solutions available online that can replace Area 1 Security. But, we have some of the top alternatives that deliver similar but more advanced functions than Area 1 Security. If you want something different, choose from the tools listed below:
1. ManageEngine Endpoint DLP Plus – FREE TRIAL
ManageEngine Endpoint DLP Plus is designed to aid organizations in safeguarding their sensitive information from loss, theft, or unauthorized access. This platform employs a variety of techniques such as device control, data encryption, and monitoring, ensuring compliance with regulations like HIPAA and PCI-DSS, while preventing data breaches.
Key Features:
- Compliance controls
- Support for various DLP and BDR methodologies
- Granular control over encryption and data safeguarding
Endpoint DLP Plus allows administrators to establish policies that restrict access to sensitive data on endpoints, including laptops and desktops. It also encrypts sensitive data and monitors user activity to detect and prevent data breaches. Additionally, this solution provides detailed reporting and alerts to notify administrators of any suspicious or unauthorized access attempts.
DLP solutions like Endpoint DLP can be employed to secure data and devices in any organization, particularly in sectors like healthcare, finance, and government, where sensitive data needs to be protected. Furthermore, it can be integrated with other ManageEngine solutions to offer a holistic security solution.
Pros:
- Flexible deployment options across multiple platforms
- It can be installed on both Windows and Linux platforms, making it more flexible than other on premise options
- Offers in-depth reporting, ideal for enterprise management or MSPs
- Integrated into more applications than most patch management solutions
Cons:
- It can take time to full explore all features and benefits offered in Endpoint DLP
Download: Click here to download your ManageEngine Endpoint DLP Plus 30-day free trial.
2. Barracuda Email Security Gateway
Barracuda Email Security Gateway is a cloud-connected email security product that protects against cyber threats like phishing, malware, spam, DoS attacks, etc. The application ensures that your business maintains continuity and performance.
Barracuda is suitable for every type and size of business and aims to protect organizations using security options, web filtering, and data archiving.
It supports outbound filtering and quarantine capabilities which ensure compliance with corporate data loss prevention (DLP) policies. Further, the tool supports features like single sign-on (SSO), email encryption, Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), etc., which make it a top choice when looking for email security tools.
If you are looking for a tool that prevents email-borne threats and data leaks, look no further. Barracuda Email Security Gateway supports easy-to-deploy configurations and other features that help businesses in managing and filtering inbound and outbound email traffic.
Another advantage of investing in Barracuda Email Security Gateway is ensuring continuous email availability with a feature to redirect traffic to other servers.
3. Mimecast Secure Email Gateway
Mimecast is another trusted cloud-based secure email gateway that supports granular admin policies and provides threat protection. It is one of the most powerful and customizable email protection tools.
One can protect their enterprise against impersonation attacks, malware, and other threats using Mimecast Secure Email Gateway.
Further, it allows users to perform a deep inspection for zero-day attacks, and other functions like SPF, DKIM, DNS-based authentication, etc. Also, users do not have to pay any extra cost for reinforcing cyber resilience.
The best part about Mimecast is its features are not restricted only to cloud-based anti-virus and anti-spam protection but cover malicious URLs and other attachments.
If you are looking for a cloud-based tool that will provide email security against present and future targeted cyber threats and other attacks like phishing, invest in Mimecast. The tool comprises various detection engines, and intelligence feeds that help prevent spear-phishing, malware, spam, and other threats.
Protect your organization from inside and outside using the machine learning technology practiced by Mimecast.
Administrators can also set policies, detect and block emails, respond to triggered alerts, and more using the popular tool. Further, the tool ensures that all the messages sent to the known recipients are automatically encrypted and authorized messages.
4. Proofpoint Email Protection Suite
Proofpoint Email Protection is an email security tool that most businesses install to protect crucial data against malware and non-malware threats. You can deploy the security tool as a cloud service as well as on-premises for identification and blocking threats before they launch.
Proofpoint not only protects your email accounts, instead it protects your data against threats targeting social media and mobile devices. There are various advantages of using Proofpoint compared to other email security tools, such as Email warning tags, email filtering, granular control of unwanted email, security monitoring, archiving facility, and recovery options.
If you want to protect your sensitive information from getting leaked due to imposter emails, opt for the Proofpoint Email Protection tool. Apart from threat protection, the tool also provides security awareness training, digital risk protection, cloud security, etc.
Users can also analyze the sender’s credibility with its advanced features. Get access to real-time reports and discover possible patterns or behavior of the attackers in advance with Proofpoint Email Protection.
5. Avanan
Avanan is an API-Based email security tool used by high-profile companies to prevent phishing attacks before they launch. The tool is easy to deploy and uses the best technology to discover threats and stop attackers from reaching the inbox.
If you are looking for an alternative to Area 1 Security, then Avanan is also a great option that protects your emails in applications like Outlook and Gmail. It covers multiple layers and monitors all incoming, outgoing, and internal emails in transit.
Another feature of Avanan is it provides historical visibility into all users and threats. Get full-suite email protection and cloud collaboration solutions from one tool – Avanan. It uses advanced AI to catch what other tools miss when discovering threats and protects against Ransomware, account takeover, BEC, supply chain attacks, etc.
Want to implement security for applications and email accounts, we recommend opting for Avanan as it supports machine learning technology to detect attacks like phishing, malware, account compromise, data loss, etc., in real-time.
6. FortiMail
FortiMail is another email protection product that can be used as an alternative to Area 1 Security. It is a cloud-based secure email gateway that monitors all incoming and outgoing emails and protects from threats like phishing, impostor emails, malware, spam, etc.
It is a part of a SIEM service and provides a wide range of deployment options, unlike other tools. Further, the leading tool ensures that the network is protected before sending the messages to the mail server and supports running on a virtual environment.
No doubt with the rise in digital business, the use of email and other platforms has increased. As a result, businesses are demanding tools that can scan threats and protect data from email threats. FortiMail is one of the top-rated threat protection tools that delivers advanced multi-layered protection and comprises integrated capabilities.
It supports Inbound and outbound filtering, spam detection, message tracking, secure message delivery (TLS and DANE), content disarm and reconstruction, URL click protection, cloud sandboxing, and real-time and scheduled scanning of Microsoft 365 mailboxes, etc.
Get access to a wide range of features using FortiMail and protect your sensitive data on emails before the attackers make any move and launch phishing campaigns.
Conclusion
Attackers know various methods to get into your system and steal sensitive information. Hence, you must always stay prepared and take the best measures to protect data. Today, even your crucial data on email is unsafe. Advanced technology has made things easier for users but has also increased the risk of loss.
By stealing a user’s identity or using phishing techniques, attackers can gain access to your sensitive data. To protect your data from such fraudulent practices, we have listed a few popular email security tools that help detect attackers and phishing campaigns before they launch.
Area 1 Security is one such popular tool that supports the preemptive concept and provides full-time security to all your inboxes. It is the best cloud-based email security tool that a company can adopt to protect data against malware, ransomware, and advanced threats.
The tool works as a layer of defense and provides comprehensive, contextual, and continuous security to accounts. Further, it enables users to analyze the conversational context, message sentiment, etc., to save from future damage. If you are not interested in its Pay-per-Phish pricing plan, you can opt for its alternatives.
We have also listed alternate solutions that enable businesses to detect and prevent data against threats.