With Office 365, your mail server is in the Microsoft Cloud. So what about your Anti Spam? Let's find out!
In the good old days, you had your internal mail server, protected by a dedicated Anti Spam appliance in your DMZ. Nowadays, Office 365 has become very popular and they've put your mail server in the Microsoft Cloud.
By default, Office 365 provides a basic Anti Spam protection that is included in your subscription cost. As an extra option, you may subscribe to the Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), which provides you enhanced protection.
How efficient is this extra protection compared to a dedicated Anti Spam solution like FortiMail?
# The test
SE Labs published very recently a study they made around "Email Security Service Protection". How did Office 365 solution performed against dedicated solution?
See for yourself:
As you can see, Office 365 default Anti Spam scored very badly, and it was not much better with the paid ATP option.
And it looks like their protection is not improving over time, because if we take a look at the report from April 2018, it was already as bad.
# The challenges
So what challenges does Office 365 pose and what kind of feedback do we hear?
- Customers report high degrees of spam, malware and other forms of attack.
- O 365 offers many plans at various price points. These differences make it difficult for customers to understand which security features they will be getting in a specific plan.
- Capability to block phishing is poor. That's why customers create custom rules, based on IP or email subjects/bodies, rather than relying on the product.
- Sandbox has a limited file type support with limiting reporting.
- There is a lack of reporting capabilities.
- Most customers tend to deploy additional email security solutions from best-of-breed security vendors.
# Conclusion
It is clear that a dedicated Anti Spam solution is necessary to ensure an enterprise grade protection.
The EASI AntiSpam-as-a-Service (ASaaS) offering is based on the powerful FortiMail platform, tuned by our experts and hosted in our Cloud2be infrastructure in Belgium.
It will allow you to benefit from a top security solution, while you can still enjoy the way you work with Office 365: Cloud based solution (no on-prem appliance), per user cost. Your biggest advantage? Great user experience and user satisfaction.
Among what the solution offers:
- Top notch Anti Spam solution
- Zero day malware prevention (via Sandboxing [emulation] of attachment)
- End-user managed quarantine with daily report
- IT admin delegation rights (domain aliases, end-users quarantine, domain wide black/white list ...)
- Reporting
- Identity based email encryption
- ...
