Moving to Cloud Email and Dropping the SEG Trailer

Business challenge

The worldwide pandemic accelerated the move to Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), a cloud-based productivity application suite. With the majority of employees working from home, this suite of apps became the primary work solution. The customer had a traditional security email gateway (SEG) that sat in front of the on-premise email solution. This solution had been manageable for on-premise email, but following the move to Microsoft 365, the SEG presented many challenges. The greatest was that it sat in front of Microsoft 365. The Microsoft defense layer knocks down 95% of spam and phishing. The customer was not receiving this benefit because of the SEG placement. (Microsoft is the largest email provider in the world. They have the visibility and ability to learn from attacks all over the world in real time, a service provided as part of the subscription cost.) The SEG was basically blinding Microsoft, so that neither the SEG nor Microsoft 365 was up to the challenge of catching the increased volume of cloud-based attacks. Other challenges included an antiquated UI and management of email security and quarantine in two separate places. Additionally, the customer realized that with the addition of Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint, users were encountering new threats. Some of these were the result of users dropping content into Teams, which meant they were bypassing the outbound email policies that filtered or stopped suspicious content. The negative impact to users and the increased workload for IT seemed to grow by day by day and week by week.

Solution

Six Degrees Consulting provided the customer with a demo and trial of Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration. We started in detect only mode, which made no changes to the customer’s established email flow. We were able to build a detailed report of the spam, phishing, malware, and anomalous activities that Microsoft 365 and the SEG were delivering to the inbox. The customer decided to extend the trial’s scope to include a small group of highly targeted users in an inline protection policy. The resulting low false-negative and low false-positive statistics got management’s attention. The company was able to fund the unplanned rollout of Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration with significant savings. Savings included lowering the security level required of Microsoft, decreasing required IT time as a result of automation, decreasing time wasted by users, and lowering the risks of executed phishing and malware attacks.

When the customer decided to move forward with Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration, the results were excellent, although they were unsurprising given the beforehand prep. The rest of the migration effort was completed by the Check Point onboarding team. All Harmony Email & Collaboration includes onboarding as part of the subscription cost.

The solution included Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration

Solutions, services, and products applied

Email and Cloud Collaboration Security: Harmony Email & Collaboration