Strengthen your email security with Barracuda Email Protection

Email remains an essential part to the functionality of organisations worldwide. Despite email services’ critical role, they are not always secured to the highest standard. The native security system of Microsoft 365, for example, often falls short to the requirements of secure protection. In this blogpost, you will discover the key areas where Microsoft 365’s security may be improved, and how Barracuda Email Protection offers stronger, more complete solutions.

Threat and impersonation detection

One of Microsoft’s main shortcomings is threat detection. It detects a significantly lower number of advanced email attacks compared to a detection system such as the Barracuda Impersonation Protection. About half of the attacks such as phishing attempts and impersonations go unnoticed by Microsoft. For more advanced attacks, Microsoft’s miss rate increases: only 1 in 10 is detected.

Similarly, the impersonation protection in Microsoft is also limited in function: its AI system depends past communication between senders and caps protection at 350 users or 50 domains. In addition to this, these features are not included in all Microsoft plans. Barracuda Impersonation Protection offers unlimited coverage and is included by default, ensuring broader, more reliable protection.

Backing up and archiving

Data backup is another important issue in email protection. Microsoft offers the option to back up your data or use third-party services, but responsibility for restoring data ultimately remains with the organisation. For daily backups, directly from cloud to cloud and with different copies isolated from Microsoft’s protection networks, Barracuda offers the Cloud-to-Cloud Backup as a solution.

For archiving, Microsoft 365 offers separate mailbox storage, however, this mailbox has restrictions concerning storage, daily growth and recovery depending on the plan. Larger organisations in particular benefit from the Barracuda’s unlimited Cloud Archive Service.

Zero-day attachment and time-of-click URL sandboxing

Microsoft includes Safe Links and Safe Attachments to protect users against malicious links and email attachments, sandboxing both. However, they are not included in all plans offered by Microsoft and come with restrictions.

Barracuda Email Gateway Defense offers an all-round alternative to Safe Attachments, combining AI with heuristics, behavioral analysis and dynamic sandboxing. Meanwhile, the Barracuda Link Protection secures URLS with minimal configuration and comes with additional features, such as training prompts to raise user awareness.

Conditional access

Lastly, while Microsoft offers Conditional Access in some plans, it does not support native passwordless certicate-based authentication, and its policies only apply after the first authentication factor. To fully optimise multifactor authentication, Barracuda delivers Zero Trust Access, which validates user and identity pairs before authentication occurs, ensuring stronger protection from the start.

In short, Barracuda offers simple, AI-powered protection to enhance the functionality of Microsoft 365. It secures your email, responds to threats and protects your data, all to keep your organisation safe. Kappa Data offers Barracuda solutions. Get in touch with us for more details by contacting [email protected].