The Email Security Revolution – How the Market Landscape Has Changed

[jrineakter]

In recent updates to the public markets, Check Point’s Founder and Executive Chairman, Gil Shwed, has continuously mentioned email security as one of the drivers of Check Point’s continuous growth. Check Point’s email security sales have already crossed into the nine-digit revenue bracket and continue to accelerate, reflecting not only widespread adoption, but also the solution’s reputation as an industry leading platform, delivering exceptional protection against advanced email-borne threats.

To unpack the sales wins, and in further understanding the strategy and forward-looking vision that drive the product and company’s competitive edge, we asked Gil Friedrich, Check Point’s VP of Email Security, and the co-founder and CEO of Avanan, several questions.

1. How has the email security market changed and what can we expect in coming years?

[GF] The email security market has experienced a shift that was really driven by the move of customers from an on-prem exchange service to cloud-based email; primarily Microsoft 365 and Gmail. This shift introduced both new attack vectors and also new methods to secure those platforms, primarily securing email via API.

What was a niche approach when we pioneered japan whatsapp number data it back in 2016 has become mainstream and a best practice in terms of how email should be secured in 2025. According to our estimates today, API-based email security accounts for about 15% of the email security market, and we expect it to be about 40%-50% of this market within the next 3-5 years. So, most of the upcoming email security market growth will be driven by API-based email security solutions.

Another major email security market transition has involved the introduction of AI and, more specifically, Large Language Models (LLMs). Back at Avanan, we identified the potential of AI and LLMs in relation to identifying phishing scams. We started deploying such models, specifically BERT, in 2019, shortly after it was introduced to open-source, by Google.

Previously, when we presented the algorithms that we used to our customers, many felt it was science fiction, but today when everyone’s using GenAI tools, telling customers that our AI can understand what the email is about – does it indicate urgency, call-to-action, writer style, etc. – everyone recognizes that AI can do the work.

Looking forward, we see how we are able to leverage generative AI as an email threat detector to perform very complex tasks. For example, instructing in human language, “if the email is selling me something, then mark it as junk”. We have experimented with such algorithms in very complex scenarios and have already been able to achieve outstanding results.

2. Could you please share a bit about the reasons as to why customers prefer Check Point’s Harmony Email & Collaboration product?

[GF] So the most basic thing is the catch rate. I would dare say that in every side-by-side comparison against other products, our solution always comes out on top. Of course, customers also look at the full suite. The two key benefits the full suite offers us are: