Article overview; why security leaders are taking a harder look at email security
- Attack chains are becoming harder to predict and defend against. In just six months, attack chain complexity increased by 127% (OPSWAT Threat Landscape Report 2025).
- The global average cost of a data breach is $4.44M (IBM, Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025).
- Gartner advises buyers to consider complementary or supplemental email security solutions to align with best practices for combating modern email threats, showcasing that major analysts are signaling that built-in protection may not be enough.
Even if most organizations already have email security tools, policies, and workflows in place, phishing still lands in inboxes, infected files still pass through, and AI-generated content is harder to distinguish from legitimate communication.
These slip-throughs aren’t the product of poor security measures as much as they are a result of rapid evolution of threats. With this in mind, “good-enough” has become a dangerous standard for evaluating email security.
For security leaders in critical infrastructure and other regulated sectors, the stakes are even higher.
Email-based cyberattacks can trigger operational disruption, compliance exposure, and business-wide consequences.
When evaluating email security vendors, leaders have to move away from the product comparison mindset, as threat detection isn’t the only relevant criterion anymore. Whichever solution is in place needs to reduce exposure to most pressing threats: unknown attachments, payload-free phishing, weaponized URLs, internal misuse, and audit gaps.
Our latest buyer’s guide is designed to help security and IT leaders ask better questions, challenge vendor assumptions, and make decisions they can defend to technical teams, executives, and auditors alike.
Built to help CISOs, security leaders, and IT decision-makers, the buyer’s guide walks readers through the scenarios that matter most when discussing email security threats.
Starting from these scenarios, leaders can reverse engineer the critical capabilities of email security solutions.
The guide also reveals the seven questions leaders should ask themselves to determine if their organization is investing in protection that matches the way modern email threats actually work.
Some of the questions include:
- How does the solution handle an attachment it has never seen before?
- What does the sandbox actually do?
- What happens to URLs at delivery and at click time?
- Does it support regulatory and audit requirements with meaningful evidence?
- Do the deployment options match the realities of your environment?
The guide also outlines a more tangible way to compare vendors.
Advertised features matter less than independent validation, measurable outcomes, and a clear view of trade-offs in deployment models, operational fit, and threat coverage.
If you are building a shortlist, reassessing your current stack, or preparing to justify an email security decision internally, this guide offers a practical framework for evaluating what meaningful protection looks like.
