FortiMail named IDC Email Security Leader

As a product manager, the start of the year is a time to take a few breaths and reflect on the successes or failures of the past year and plan for future projects.  When we have invested so much effort into our products, we know their strengths, but spending so much time in such close proximity to a solution can also make one a bit blinkered. Which is why it is always important to get outside opinions on your progress as a sanity check. Of course, customer feedback is essential, and always very welcome, but it was particularly satisfying to begin the year with an accolade from an industry analyst recognizing the functionality and effectiveness of FortiMail.

“IDC, a global market intelligence firm, named Fortinet's FortiMail as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Email Security 2016 Vendor Assessment (December 2016).”

As the product manager for FortiMail, it’s probably obvious that I would get (overly?) excited about such an assessment, but this is an important report for several reasons beyond our being recognized.

Email continues to be the most critical threat vector for cybercrime. According to the Verizon Data Breach Report 2016, over 75% of attacks use email as their primary attack route.  So while email may seem more like a legacy technology, it in fact continues to function as both a critical business tool and a major security risk and threat vector, which means that it is definitely something that continues to require robust protection.

FortiMail has evolved over the past 12 years to become the email security leader it is today.  FortiGuard Labs, which provides FortiMail with constant threat updates and analysis, analyzes billions of emails per day, identifying new outbreaks and emerging threats and stopping them before they can spread.  We are also rightly proud of FortiMail’s antispam performance, continually placing at the top of the pack in the Virus Bulletin VBSPAM tests. In fact, we routinely test the effectiveness of that technology with independent third-party labs, participating in more than 40 Virus Bulletin VBSPAM tests over the years, as well as the newer ICSA Advanced Threat Defense certification. 

However, it is our recent development strategy which has drawn the most positive comments from IDC. FortiMail is both a core component of the Fortinet Security Fabric, allowing it to share threat intelligence and visibility across the Fortinet product set, and has been tightly integrated with FortiSandbox to identify zero day attacks and advanced persistent threats (APTs) before they enter the network. These two advances were a key factor in our leadership placement by IDC.

So, while email may be a legacy business technology that has been around since 1971, Fortinet’s strategy for tackling email-bourne threats continues to be cutting edge. 

For more info on our IDC placement, register here