Cloudflare Takes On Email Security

Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, today announced its entry into email security with new offerings to help solve email challenges in an easy-to-use way that gives customers more control. Now, users will be able to create custom email addresses, manage incoming email routing, and prevent email spoofing and phishing on outgoing emails—all for free. Cloudflare also announced that customers can sign up for early access to its Advanced Email Security Suite, tightly integrated with all of Cloudflare’s Zero Trust solutions, for a more holistic way to keep businesses and their employees secure and productive.

Email is one of the largest threats facing both consumers and businesses today. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center 2020 Internet Crime Report shows that phishing attacks were the most common type of cyberattack in 2020. The reason, according to Forrester: “the biggest problems with email are its ubiquity and our willingness to trust it. Every person has an email account, often more than one, making this medium a perennially ripe target for attackers.” Solutions to date have made inroads into the problem, without comprehensively tackling it.

“Customers have asked us to address email security for years. Today we’re announcing new tools that will help close the biggest remaining network security risk that Cloudflare hasn’t already covered, until now,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “We want to be the network that businesses of any size can plug into for all of their needs. While today marks our first step into this space, we ultimately hope to become the leader in email security.”

Creating, managing, and securing email services can be complex tasks requiring technical expertise. Today Cloudflare is announcing two features that customers can take advantage of to help with this:

Cloudflare Email Routing

First, Cloudflare is providing customers with powerful new email routing tools to streamline email management. Cloudflare Email Routing will give customers more control over their email and empower them to have professional addressing while relying on any email hosting provider, whether it's hosted Exchange, managed Office 365, Gmail, Google Workplace, or an old Aol.com address. This is particularly powerful for small businesses who may want to have a custom domain on their email addresses, but behind the scenes still be managing everything out of a consumer Gmail account.