Joerg Habermeier - stock.adobe.c
Office 365 adoption creating opportunity for email security providers
The rise in the number of users looking at changing their email strategy has opened the door for a wider discussion about security
The shift by customers towards Office 365 has sparked an opportunity for those in the channel pitching email security and vendors in that space are urging partners to get involved.
Resellers might be suffering from the misconceptions that firstly the email security market is not very dynamic and secondly that the threats in that area have long since been contained.
At the end of last month Proofpoint revealed it was banging the drum loudly on the issue and that has been followed up by Barracuda, which is also a major player in the email security space, which is warning that this is an area where customers will be making investments as they update their communication strategies.
Chris Ross, svp of Barracuda's international operations, said that it had surveyed its own partners and 75% said that they had customers who had suffered from the growing problem of email account takeover and 57% had customers that had seen their brand impersonated negatively.
"Our focus is how do we enable our partners to have the conversation to be able to position it with CEO fraud, account takeover and brand impersonation," he said.
"Email security is seeing a massive growth spurt at the moment, particularly driven by the growth in Office 365," he added "The Office 365 market is growing at 40% plus and in the UK there are 5.2m Office 365 users and its growing at 40%. That's a shift from on-prem to cloud and as that shift happens it is interesting to look at what the security posture looks like for those customers. There is a large proportion that does not do anything and move to Office 365 thinking they are fully protected."
"The drive for our partners is to have that conversation and if you are not talking to customers about Office 365 planning, migration and actual deployment then one of your competitors is," he added.
The firm has stepped up its training with partner academies running to arm resellers with the knowledge and skills to be able to get the message around email security right.
"Email is growing and becoming super critical in the security discussion. You cannot talk about security without having a conversation about email," he said.
