Two years ago, one of APAC’s largest real estate companies embarked on a journey to address the ever-increasing sophistication and risk of email-based threats.
To protect their brand and billions of dollars worth of online transactions they turned to both SMX and Microsoft.
SMX’s regional threat intelligence and support, with exceptional catch rates, combined with Microsoft’s advanced threat protection provided the optimal email security solution.
The result was an uplift in catch rates of ~15,000 emails per week, improved deliverability and a powerful yet simple way to remove pressure from their IT support desk.
As one of APAC’s largest real estate companies, this company utilises email as their main form of communication through which their brand and billions of dollars worth of transactions are reliant.
Given the financial and reputational risks on the line, the Infrastructure Manager was looking for a solution to bolster their cyber security stance by hedging their bets across multiple platforms. So, two years ago they started the process to get SMX and Office 365 to work together.
“We wanted best of breed across both Microsoft and SMX.” the Infrastructure Manager explains. “We were seeing poor catch rates on some of our smaller domains with Microsoft on its own and we knew we could significantly increase the catch rate if we combined the two. Microsoft has global defences and are providing continual improvements to their ATP (advanced threat protection) but we need the local defence from SMX too.”
This imperative was made even more urgent when they started to notice increasing sophistication in email attacks. The Infrastructure Manager notes, “We are very susceptible to BEC (business email compromise) and felt we needed another defensive tier. We noticed a lot more URLs coming in benign that were then being weaponised once in a mailbox. Office 365’s ATP offered the ability to check these [weaponised URLs] and then with the SIEM integration it gave us a lot more event information to understand what was happening across the estate.”
The journey to combine Office 365 with SMX’s secure email gateway resulted in choosing SMX 365. SMX 365 provides targeted, regional threat detection for enterprise and government organisations and being architected specifically to deliver dual-layer security with Microsoft Exchange Online/Advanced Threat Protection (EOP/ATP), improves accuracy, reduces risk, and makes it easy to protect end-users.
“We looked at other email security providers but chose SMX due to their cost structure, higher catch rate, ability to send clean outbound email and the fact they’re local.” With the partner decided upon, the client started the implementation process.
“The biggest process was working out how email flow works.” The Infrastructure Manager said. “We wanted to do a zero touch implementation so end users wouldn’t notice. We ensured hygiene tasks were completed first, we turned on ATP in the background, enacted DKIM and DMARC as well as ensured whitelists were up to date. From there we slowly enabled the dual protection by turning on features and testing on smaller domains before rolling the changes out across the estate.”
The client noticed dramatic results from the dual protection of SMX 365 and ATP. “SMX does the bulk of the grunt work. It filters 90-95% of the noise with Microsoft catching the remainder. With the dual filtering [SMX 365] we saw an uplift in catch rates of 15,000 additional catches per week and on our volume that’s huge.”
We've come to trust that SMX has got our backs, so we can get on with running other things.Lyndon Reynolds, Director, UCIT