Part 1 – changes in the industry

The email and web security industry has seen many changes over the past years, especially in the cloud or SaaS market. Many vendors in this space started by offering email anti-malware and anti-spam services. They then added email content control and web anti-malware and URL filtering.

Some vendors invested heavily, built their own multi-tenant infrastructure, patented their technology and owned intellectual property, whilst others simply purchased and deployed enterprise equipment into datacenters and managed it on behalf of their customers. Some were more serious about security than others, offering multiple signature-based AV engines as well as proprietary protection technologies and elements of data loss prevention.

Around the mid 2000s the market became quite crowded, with a number of large cloud email and web security vendors, some mid-sized ones and lots of smaller, local players. In the second half...