Small and medium-sized businesses are still on a cloud adoption journey and for the majority of them, embracing a cloud-based email service is the first checkpoint along the way.
Small and medium-sized businesses are still on a cloud adoption journey and for the majority of them, embracing a cloud-based email service is the first checkpoint along the way. Indeed, it tops the most used cloud-based business applications worldwide, according to the latest report from Kaspersky Lab. Now, a new Security-as-a-Service offering from Kaspersky Lab is bringing Next Generation detection technologies, powered by machine learning and real-time cloud-based threat intelligence to cloud-based email systems, providing enhanced protection for Exchange Online in Microsoft Office 365.
Email is still in the crosshairs of cybercriminals
Sending and receiving emails is a part of every business’s daily routine, so it is no wonder that cybercriminals are still committed to finding new ways of exploiting this for their own malicious purposes. According to the recent quarterly spam report from Kaspersky Lab, there has been a steady growth and increasing levels of deviousness used in phishing and spam campaigns. For SMBs in particular, this means that IT administrators are having to spend more of their time deleting irrelevant emails and recovering mistakenly-deleted messages, instead of working on business-critical IT tasks.
Moreover, irrelevant emails are not only a challenge for IT resource efficiency and employee productivity. They become a real threat to a business when it comes to the phishing of staff credentials or the spreading of malware in email attachments. In 28% of targeted attacks that happened this year, the use of phishing/social engineering was a major contributing factor[1].
Essential protection for email: on-premises and in the cloud
To address these security challenges and help small and medium-sized businesses protect their on-premises email systems, Kaspersky Lab offers protection for mail servers and mail gateways as targeted solutions. This year, we are expanding our SMB portfolio by adding a new product — Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365 — to extend protection to the cloud-based mail service Exchange Online inside the Microsoft Office 365 suite.
Working in conjunction with Microsoft’s built-in protection, the combined security solution provides users of Microsoft Office 365 with enhanced protection from ransomware, malicious attachments, spam, phishing (including Business E-mail Compromise - BEC) and unknown threats. The range of Next Generation security technologies enabled in the product includes a neural network-based anti-phishing engine, machine learning-based detection, sandboxing, attachment filtering and Kaspersky Lab’s global threat intelligence network — all powered by Kaspersky Lab’s HuMachine© which combines human expertise with big data threat intelligence and machine learning to defend against every type of threat a business may face.
Native integration in the cloud and ease of management
Like Microsoft Office 365, Kaspersky Lab’s product is hosted in the cloud, which offers convenient and flexible cloud-based management for both email and security. Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365 provides small and medium-sized businesses with many benefits, such as easy configuration and native integration with Exchange Online, a dashboard showing statistics on threats and detections at-a-glance, and the ability to backup and recover deleted emails.
Along with Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud, the new product is managed from a single cloud-based administration console. MSPs/MSSPs and outsourced IT administrators will benefit from its multi-tenancy, which allows protection for different organizations to be simply managed. It can also support multiple accounts for different administrators, providing increased flexibility and ease of use.
Vladimir Zapolyansky, Head of SMB Business at Kaspersky Lab, comments: “With millions of emails sent on a daily basis, it might take just one – with a malicious attachment such as ransomware or a phishing link — to damage or even destroy a business. With the release of this new product, we are excited to provide our customers who are migrating to the cloud-based Microsoft Exchange in Office 365 with Next Generation security technologies to protect their email communications – whether they’re hosted on-premises or in the cloud.”
Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365 is available globally now and can be purchased online. To learn more about the product and start a full-functionality free trial please visit cloud.kaspersky.com. Customers can also purchase Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365 from Kaspersky Lab partners from February 8.
[1] Report ‘The Human Factor in IT Security: How Employees are Making Businesses Vulnerable from Within’ from Kaspersky Lab and B2B International, June, 2017, URL: https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/the-human-factor-in-it-security/
