Scott Woodgate and Ramya Chitrakar present real-world benchmarking results on layered email security using Microsoft Defender for Office 365 and ICES/SEG vendors, empowering security leaders with transparent data-driven insights.

Transparent Benchmarking and Layered Email Security with Microsoft Defender

Authors: Scott Woodgate and Ramya Chitrakar

Overview

Microsoft’s latest benchmarking report provides data-driven insights on how layered email security approaches perform in real-world scenarios. The study evaluates Microsoft Defender for Office 365’s effectiveness when combined with Secure Email Gateway (SEG) and Integrated Cloud Email Security (ICES) solutions, focusing on transparency, comprehensive threat detection, and post-delivery remediation.

Key Findings

  • Layered Security Architecture: Organizations are adopting multilayered defenses involving Microsoft Defender, SEG, and ICES vendors to combat increasingly sophisticated email threats.
  • Updated Benchmarking Methodology: The new report refines detection metrics, correcting previous misattributions and incorporating customer/partner feedback for improved accuracy. Integration patterns such as journaling and connector-based reinjection are now better accounted for to avoid inflated or duplicated threat attribution.
  • Real-World Data: The testing utilizes actual email threats observed across the Microsoft ecosystem, rather than simulated attacks, ensuring results reflect practical deployment.

Detailed Results

  • Defender & ICES Layering: Adding ICES solutions to environments with Defender improves filtering of marketing and bulk emails by 9.4% on average, reducing inbox clutter. Gains in spam and malicious email filtering are modest (1.65% and 0.5%, respectively).
  • Post-Delivery Remediation: Defender’s zero-hour auto purge removes 45% of malicious mail post-delivery, while ICES vendors account for about 55% in similar remediation, underscoring the need for layered, post-delivery threat removal.
  • SEG Benchmarking: Microsoft Defender missed fewer threats compared to other SEG solutions, corroborating prior benchmarking trends.

Transparency and Planning

  • Benchmarking results are aggregated, anonymized, and aligned with Microsoft’s security and privacy policies, following best practices from industry reports such as the Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2025.
  • The report equips security leaders with actionable insights to evaluate and optimize their protection strategies when deploying layered security solutions.

Further Resources

Conclusion

Quarterly benchmarking will continue as Microsoft evolves reporting methodologies in collaboration with customers and partners. The emphasis remains on transparency and providing meaningful, up-to-date data for the security community.

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