Email has become the core of digital communication today. Although there have been communication apps and many similar methods to communicate online, email still enables billions of people and organizations to connect with one another to send messages. Today, as the latest statistics suggest approximately 333.2 billion emails are sent per day, which works out at well over 3.5 million emails per second.

Being a fast and effective way to communicate, email at the same time is the attackers’ first choice to approach the targets especially for social engineering and phishing attacks. From an attacker’s perspective email is the most visible and popular method for infecting an organization’s digital assets which makes focusing email security as a crucial security measure for IT security. Accounting for almost 90% of reported malware cases, email is described as a critical attack vector. An estimated 3.4 billion malicious email attacks are sent to businesses around the world every single day. The process of ensuring the availability, integrity and authenticity of email communications by protecting against the risk of email threats is the usual description of email security.Therefore, ensuring email security has been one of the critical issues when it comes to protecting the organizations from cyber threats.

 The Overview of Email Security Market 

The services offered to safeguard inboxes of billions of users are wide with many companies and several tools. Either free or commercial, email security vendors specialize in defending email communications for organizations by offering ongoing technical support and incident response in addition to their email protection softwares. They usually deal with Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), malware detection and intrusion behavior. It is also critical to underline that email security has been closely associated with security awareness training with which the end users have become more robust against an attacker’s attempt to deceive them. 

The estimations suggest the email security market is going to keep expanding. In an international  global email security market research carried out by Report Ocean, the global email security market is estimated to grow by 18.6% every year from 2021 to 2031. By 2031, it is estimated to reach $22,953.5m. One of the drivers for this growth is the increased need for data security that has been brought about by the rise in the number of email users. Increase in scams and spear-phishing has also contributed to the growth of the global email security market. Other reasons for the growth include requirements to comply with regulations and high demand for encryption services.

Although it is obvious that email security is pivotal for organizations’ cyber hygiene, there are certain limitations for the market to grow further. Deploying e-mail security solutions can be relatively expensive. The cost depends mainly on three factors: 

• Required email security features
• Number of employees 
• Installation and monitoring fees

The process is also complicated and maybe costly, thus external support is needed. Email security configuration fees are typically charged per hour and can range between $99 – $275 per hour (2021). This has made it out of reach for many companies, especially SMEs.  Additionally, there are plenty of free open-source software in the market that some companies prefer to use. Government policies change on a regular basis making it difficult to adhere to the constantly changing regulations as well. Lastly, there is still not enough awareness when it comes to email encryption among many organizations.

Who are the Actors in the Email Security Market? 

The leading market players in the global market include Alphabet Inc., Barracuda Networks Inc., Check Point Software Technologies Ltd., Cisco Systems Inc., Dell Technologies Inc., Egress Software Technologies Ltd., Entrust Datacard Corp., Fortinet Inc., Fusion Connect Inc., Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., Mimecast Ltd., Open Text Corp., Proofpoint Inc., Proton AG, Sophos Ltd., Trellix, Trend Micro Inc., and Trustifi LLC.

Key market segments can be grouped by component, deployment type, industry vertical and region. Component segments can further be divided into products and services subsegments. The deployment type segment includes cloud and on-premise. BFSI, Healthcare, Government and IT & Telecom subsegments make up the Industry Vertical Segment. Their market is divided into four regions: North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and LAMEA.

The usually acknowledged characteristics of the email security market is fragmentation. According to the reports, the degree of fragmentation is expected to decelerate during the period of 2021-2026. Large multinational vendors dominate the market and there are many small-scale local actors. As a sign of consolidation, large vendors have long pursued the strategy of acquiring smaller ones mainly for the purpose of expanding product portfolio. As a significant opportunity for market growth, with the increasing tendency of remote working and employee mobility organizations have started to focus more on email security.