Security leaders today are rethinking email security, not because traditional methods have failed outright, but because the threat landscape and business needs have evolved beyond what legacy approaches can handle.
A surprising but apt analogy keeps surfacing: email security is stuck where antivirus (AV) was a decade ago, and it’s time it evolved like AV did, into an element of EDR.
The comparison might not be obvious at first. After all, email and endpoints seem like apples and oranges.
But when you look deeper, especially at the way EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) grew from the core of AV, the parallel becomes impossible to ignore. Understanding that evolution offers a roadmap for what’s next in email security.
AV to EDR: A Lesson in Resilience
For years, legacy AV promised total protection. The goal was to detect and block every malicious file. If a file looked good, it was allowed. If it matched a known signature of badness, it was blocked. This binary “yes or no” model worked, until it didn’t.
Attackers adapted. Malware became polymorphic. New threats emerged faster than vendors could write signatures. Eventually, the industry had to admit an uncomfortable truth: 100% prevention is impossible.
That’s when EDR entered the scene. Rather than trying to replace AV entirely, EDR surrounded it, adding visibility, detection of suspicious behavior, forensic capabilities, and remediation tools.
Crucially, it introduced resilience into the security stack. Even if something slipped past AV, EDR was there to catch it later, investigate it, and limit its damage.
The endpoint had become a critical access point for attackers. Protecting it meant going beyond prevention, it required detection, response, and hardening.
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