SBN

Modern Email Security For Everyone: Our Partnership With Intermedia

It’s a landmark day at Armorblox and we are excited to finally share something the entire team has been working hard on for a long time. Today, we announced a strategic technology partnership with Intermedia, a leading developer of cloud communications, collaboration, productivity, email, and email security solutions. This partnership brings Armorblox email protection to the mailboxes of tens of thousands of businesses and counting.

## **Better Algorithms With Better Data**

Building an email security platform driven by AI and NLU can easily descend into buzzwords-but-nothing-else territory if the platform doesn’t have the right datasets to feed it. At Armorblox, we have been aware of this from the outset and made sure our platform learns and gets better with the right data.

Custom models built for every customer and user allows us to stop highly targeted, context-driven attacks. Deep learning models trained on massive corpuses of fraud data enables us to predict fraud emails with a high degree of accuracy. The Intermedia partnership supercharges our already unique detection capabilities. Threat data from tens of thousands of organizations across industries and sizes now feeds back into our algorithms, lending us unprecedented visibility into email threats seen in the wild.

Armorblox already had algorithms that looked at threats differently and truly understood the context these threats weaponized. Now the algorithms can leverage troves of data unlike what any other modern email security solution can.

## **Extra Coffees For Engineering**

Armorblox has yet to have its fourth birthday. For early and growth stage startups, it’s critical for the team to have lean and impactful priorities to execute on. During 2020 – when lockdown was persistent and the light at the end of the tunnel was less certain than it is now – Armorblox was presented with a scenario that was simultaneously a huge opportunity and a daunting challenge.

To make the Intermedia partnership a reality, we had to:

* Rapidly scale our NLU platform without losing performance or detection fidelity.
* Provide support for Exchange mail environments which were not cloud-native, unlike Office 365 and Google Workspace which we already supported.
* Build a fully multi-tenant architecture.

These problem statements were arguably too soon to tackle for a company founded in 2017, but the team rose to the challenge. The engineering team quickly formulated a plan and dedicated multiple sprints to this effort. We created an Exchange Connector, a lightweight agent installed on perimeter firewalls, that connected to on-premise Exchange email servers and fed data back to the Armorblox cloud for real-time threat detection. We re-architected the platform for full multi-tenancy. And we delivered on being able to support unprecedented scale.

Our engineering superheroes deserve all the kudos, hearty handshakes, and doffed hats in the world. I hope they can take a moment to sit back, reflect on their efforts, and momentarily replace that coffee with a more celebratory beverage of their choice.

## **Casting The Net Far And Wide**

I mentioned priorities a few paragraphs ago but didn’t fully close out the point. For a lean team with so much to do, why did Armorblox prioritize the Intermedia partnership? The clearest and simplest reason was that it aligned with our mission to provide modern email security to as many people as possible.

Large enterprises are certainly targets for cybercriminals, but so are millions of small and medium businesses across the globe – businesses that are at risk of going under after one successful BEC attack. The world is certainly moving to Office 365 and Google Workspace, but there are still scores of organizations on hosted Exchange – organizations that are still targeted by advanced, payloadless attacks that get past traditional email threat detection.

Intermedia serves over 122,000 organizations, from small and medium businesses to Fortune 100 companies. They also have 7,000 channel partners to further package, resell, and manage their solutions. They support hosted Exchange environments as well as Office 365.

Through this partnership, Armorblox helps organizations communicate more securely over email irrespective of their size, industry, or email deployment. Securing the human layer should not come with any asterisks.

### Want to see Armorblox in action? Request a demo with an email security expert here.