Businesses are stepping up their email security game as hackers ramp up their email-based attacks, according to analyst firm Frost & Sullivan.

The company revealed that spending on email security worldwide rose by 15.9% year on year in 2018, with predictions indicating this could generate a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.9% by 2022.

Frost & Sullivan explained that this is presenting a huge opportunity for security vendors, suggesting if they’re not already offering an email security product, they certainly should explore it, taking advantage of the growing popularity of Office 365 and Google G-Suite.

“[Vendors] will also be looking to build out global data centres to meet data privacy regulations, strengthen cloud resilience, and engage with public cloud (AWS, Azure) for higher scalability,” said Tony Massimini, the firm’s senior industry analyst for Digital Transformation.

“Furthermore, they may invest in a global threat intelligence network in order to leverage threat intelligence and analytics for advanced threat detection and other functions for email security.”

To date, the email security marketplace has been a crowded and fragmented sector, but now vendors looking to differentiate themselves from the competition should be looking to collaborate with other firms and offer something truly unique.

For example, they should be introducing automation to help fill the security skills gap, focus on GDPR compliance and ensuring they offer all-in-one security solutions to address a business’s entire infrastructure.

Other areas expected to increase revenue growth are integrating malware-less threat detection using threat analytics and behavioural analysis. Data loss prevention is also a growing trend that firms are expecting to invest in.

“Already, vendors like Mimecast offer a fully integrated suite of proprietary cloud services, while the Symantec Email Security solution tightly integrates with security environments via the Symantec Integrated Cyber Defense platform,” Massimini added.