CRN has released its list of the Ten Hottest New Cloud Security Tools of 2020 and I am incredibly proud to say that Cloud Mailbox is featured on the list. After all of the work I've seen poured into the project in the lead-up to the launch, it is wonderful to see industry recognition and to share it with the talented group of Cisco folks who made it happen.

One small step for customers, one giant leap for Cisco

Cloud Mailbox represents Cisco's entry into a new product space. The API-based email security market is differentiated from traditional gateway solutions in part by how simple and fast it is to deploy. By focusing on ease-of-use and simplicity, we are able to serve a market of organizations with smaller security and IT teams who have chosen Microsoft's cloud email solution in order to reduce complexity.

As CRN notes, our email security portfolio had previously centered around a gateway solution. That means that our customers needed to reconfigure their mail flow to inspect messages and apply security policies. While this is still the preferred solution for larger customers who need advanced and granular policy controls, many non-enterprise organizations are hesitant to alter their infrastructure and would rather use a purely SaaS-delivered product.

With Cloud Mailbox we can now offer an alternative to the gateway solution that integrates directly with Microsoft as an Azure Enterprise Application and simply "plugs in" within five minutes.

Email security as stress reduction

As we survey the IT landscape, we cannot help but see that the level of burn-out and stress already known to our industry has only increased with the events of the last year. We know that introducing new technology often adds to this problem as administrators, analysts, and engineers are burdened with new things to learn, new interfaces to configure, and new dashboards to monitor. Our goal in developing Cloud Mailbox was not only to ensure that the product itself had no learning curve, but that its daily use would decrease the workload on administrators.

Cloud Mailbox is designed to take any indicator that may need investigation, and instantly return actionable results. By actionable, I don't mean that the administrator can print or log the results for use in another tool. I mean that the results displayed can be actioned with one click in the user interface. We are taking a process that takes minutes to hours using the Microsoft Exchange Online Protection portal and making it possible in seconds.

Small and medium-sized customers need additional protection from attacks just as much as the enterprise. We can now offer it to them in a solution that not only preserves the simplicity of their deployment but makes the daily struggle of triage and threat remediation faster and easier than it has ever been.

Final thoughts

I want to make sure that I extend congratulations to everyone on the Cloud Mailbox team. You have helped grow a true innovation idea to product launch in an astonishing amount of time, and this recognition is well-deserved.

Learn more about Cisco Secure Email Cloud Mailbox