Your Email Security is Stuck in the AV Era. It’s Time for EDR for Email.

For the last twenty years, the primary focus of innovation in email security has been a singular push to build a better phish trap. Vendors have cycled through signature-based gateways, sandboxes, and now AI-powered detectors, all chasing the same goal: stop the initial phish from landing in the inbox.

This is a necessary, but dangerously incomplete, strategy.

While the rest of the security world has evolved, email security remains stuck in a prevention-only mindset. Outside of email, we have collectively accepted that for our most critical assets—our endpoints and networks—prevention will eventually fail. We embraced an “Assume Breach” mentality and built entire markets around tools that answer the question, “what happens next?”

We moved from legacy antivirus to Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR): evolving how we secure endpoints to an approach that still blocks as many attacks as possible, but that also provides deeper visibility into activity in the endpoint, broad automation, and robust response tactics. We did this because perimeter-only AV defense continued to fail, and we knew we needed a better solution.

So why do we still accept the equivalent of a legacy AV solution for our single biggest attack vector?

The lesson we all learned from the endpoint

Think back to the shift from AV to EDR. It was a watershed moment for security professionals. Legacy AV was a binary gatekeeper: it blocked known-bad files and allowed everything else. The model was simple, but brittle. Determined attackers, armed with zero-days or novel techniques, could waltz right past the perimeter.

The industry matured and admitted a hard truth: 100% prevention is a myth.

EDR was born from this realization. It didn’t replace AV; it contextualized it as one part of a larger system. EDR platforms gave security teams the visibility and control they desperately needed inside the endpoint. They allowed us to hunt for threats, investigate intrusions, and respond to incidents that had already bypassed the front gate.

It wasn't an admission that prevention had failed; it was an acknowledgement that the problem was far bigger than just the perimeter. It was about resilience. 

Email security’s EDR moment is here

Today, most email security vendors are still selling you a better AV. Their entire value proposition is built on the promise of a slightly better catch rate. They are hyper-focused on the inbound gate, leaving security teams blind to the most critical phase of the attack: what an adversary does after they inevitably gain access to an account.

A modern, resilient security strategy requires an "EDR for Email" approach—a platform that provides detection and response capabilities across the entire lifecycle of a threat, not just the entry point.

This is what Detection and Response for your Cloud Office looks like:

• Detection beyond the perimeter: It’s not just about finding malware in an attachment. It’s about detecting the real indicators of risk: a misconfigured setting that leaves sensitive data exposed in Google Drive, a sudden spike in suspicious email forwarding rules, or an employee using their corporate credentials to sign up for an unsanctioned, high-risk application.
• Response that reduces the blast radius: A real response isn’t just quarantining an email. It’s having automated playbooks that can revoke a risky file share, challenge a suspicious login with multi-factor authentication, or temporarily lock down a compromised account to halt an attack in its tracks.
• Resilience that neutralizes the target: This is the most critical piece. An EDR for Email approach makes the environment itself fundamentally less valuable to an attacker. By identifying and protecting years of sensitive data sitting at rest in mailboxes and cloud files, you remove the "jet fuel" an attacker needs to cause real damage. Even if they get in, there is nothing for them to steal.

From "did it get blocked?" to "what's the blast radius?"

Operating with a legacy, prevention-only mindset forces security teams to ask a very limited question: Did the phish get blocked?

This is no longer sufficient. A modern security program asks better, more strategic questions:

• If this account is compromised right now, what is the immediate blast radius?
• What sensitive data, contracts, or PII are instantly exposed?
• How would we prevent the attacker from using this account to pivot and compromise other SaaS applications?
• How are we automatically and surgically shrinking that blast radius to near-zero without disrupting the business?

If your current email security vendor can't answer these questions, they aren't providing you with a complete solution.

Stop buying a better gate. Start building a resilient system.

Investing in a slightly better phish trap is an incremental improvement to an outdated strategy. The most sophisticated, payload-less, and socially-engineered attacks will always find a way in.

Mature security programs understand this. They build systems that are resilient by design. They complement strong prevention with deep visibility and powerful response capabilities inside their environment. They did it for the endpoint. It’s time to do it for your most critical collaboration and data hub: your cloud office.

It's time to ask your email security vendor what their plan is for post-breach resilience. If they don’t have one, it’s time to find a partner who does.

To learn how we’re building resilient protection that goes beyond prevention, contact us to give Material Security a try today.

‍