Email Security Market Size & Share Analysis - Growth Trends & Forecasts (2025 - 2030)

Global Email Security Market Trends and Insights

Rising phishing and BEC incidents

Global BEC losses climbed as the average attack cost hit USD 35,000 in 2024, pushing email security from a compliance check to a business-continuity requirement ^{[1]Splunk Inc., “State of Security 2025,” splunk.com}. Attackers now blend social-engineering, deepfakes and reply-chain hijacks that evade rule-based gateways, so enterprises are shifting budgets toward ICES platforms that analyze user behavior, language patterns and conversation context in real time. These capabilities shorten mean-time-to-detect and support automated remediation, which is essential when organizations face 1,636 attempted cyberattacks per week. Adoption is most vigorous in regulated industries—finance, healthcare, critical utilities—where BEC campaigns are weaponizing trusted supplier relationships to bypass perimeter defenses.

Shift to cloud email and remote work

With 94% of Asia-Pacific SMEs embracing cloud SaaS and Microsoft’s security business surpassing USD 20 billion annual revenue, perimeter appliances cannot cover distributed teams or collaboration-suite traffic. Organizations therefore prefer API-level controls that plug directly into Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and Slack, enabling full inspection of inbound, outbound and intra-suite messages. Adoption further accelerates because cloud licensing costs scale predictably, and updates to machine-learning models roll out instantly without change-window downtime. SMEs benefit disproportionately because they avoid capital expenditure and specialist staffing, driving the double-digit growth logged in managed security services.

Stringent data-protection regulations

The EU’s NIS2 Directive now covers roughly 30,000 German entities versus 2,000 under NIS1, requiring encryption via S/MIME or OpenPGP, incident reporting within 24 hours and board-level accountability. Parallel rules in the United States Treasury and upcoming UK Cyber Resilience Bill expand disclosure obligations, so buyers select platforms that automate compliance templates and maintain evidentiary audit trails. Vendors offering regional data-residency, client-side key management and tamper-proof archiving gain a defensible edge, particularly among multinational healthcare and finance customers that must juggle HIPAA, GDPR and PCI-DSS.

AI/ML-driven threat detection

Microsoft’s Language AI for Phish Models can parse sentiment and linguistic anomalies, boosting detection of novel lures that lack known indicators. Check Point, meanwhile, achieved 100% phishing prevention and 99.8% new-malware blocking in independent tests, validating the payoff from deep-learning engines that enrich billions of daily signals. Vendors differentiate on model transparency and low false-positive rates because security teams drown if every marketing newsletter is flagged. As AI gains contextual awareness—linking mailbox, endpoint, and identity telemetry—response can shift from block-and-quarantine to guided user coaching and automatic isolation of risky assets.

High implementation and maintenance cost

Total cost of ownership often triples license expenditure once integration, SOC headcount and 24×7 monitoring are factored in, a pain point when two-thirds of SMEs already spend 4% of annual revenue on cybersecurity. Boards demand quantifiable ROI, so vendors that embed automation and managed-service tiers mitigate sticker shock. Nevertheless, organizations postponing upgrades extend refresh cycles, slowing overall email security market growth in price-sensitive regions.

Free/open-source alternatives

Postfix, SpamAssassin and Microsoft’s built-in Exchange Online Protection set a “good-enough” baseline, especially for smaller firms. Yet these tools lag in language-aware BEC detection, adaptive DLP and granular compliance analytics. Vendors must therefore articulate value beyond spam filtering, demonstrating how AI models catch polymorphic malware or how automated encryption satisfies industry mandates. Pricing pressure persists, but rising threat complexity gradually erodes the free-tool ceiling.

Segment Analysis

By Component: Services Growth Outpaces Solutions

Solutions commanded 70.20% revenue in 2024, yet managed services are climbing at a 15.20% CAGR as firms outsource threat hunting, playbook tuning and compliance audits CRN. The email security market size for services is therefore set to expand faster than software, reflecting buyers’ need for 24×7 coverage and outcome-based contracts. Proofpoint’s USD 1 billion purchase of Hornetsecurity underscores the pivot toward MSP enablement, providing white-label SOC capabilities that MSPs can resell to SME clients. In parallel, professional services for deployment remain relevant, but their share shrinks because cloud APIs trim integration times from weeks to hours. Vendors with global service footprints and multilingual SOCs win long-term renewals because clients value consistent SLAs across regions.

Enterprises that keep operations in-house still lean on vendor premium support for model tuning, policy design and red-team simulations. Those engagements generate telemetry that feeds machine-learning feedback loops, reinforcing product stickiness. Services portfolios also expand into security-awareness training, phishing simulations and incident-response retainers. As a result, services catalyze cross-sell of adjacent platform modules such as CASB and XDR, positioning providers to capture wallet share as regulations tighten.

Note: Segment Share of all individual segments available upon report purchase

By Deployment Mode: Cloud Dominance Accelerates

Cloud-hosted controls captured 58.90% share in 2024 and will outgrow on-premises appliances at a 17.20% CAGR, making the cloud segment the largest contributor to future email security market size. Customers cite elastic scaling, instant rule updates and native integration with Microsoft Graph APIs as decisive benefits. Further momentum stems from government pushes to adopt “cloud-first” procurement policies that require SaaS justifications before approving capital budgets. 

Conversely, latency-sensitive industries such as financial trading and defense keep segmented mailflow on private appliances to satisfy deterministic delivery requirements and air-gap constraints. Hybrid architectures therefore persist: inbound scanning remains cloud-based, while outbound policy enforcement or encryption keys stay on-premises. Appliance refreshes increasingly include containerized micro-services so organizations can redeploy functions to Kubernetes clusters when sovereignty rules evolve.

By Enterprise Size: SME Adoption Accelerates

Large enterprises still generate 61.30% of 2024 revenue, but SMEs are expanding at 18.40% CAGR, narrowing the gap each year. More than half of Asia-Pacific SMEs reported a cyber incident in 2024, prompting boards to re-evaluate “good-enough” spam filters. Cloud subscription models priced per active mailbox remove upfront hardware costs, while pay-as-you-grow tiers let firms add sandboxing and DMARC analytics once budget permits. 

Meanwhile, Fortune 500 groups are consolidating parallel toolsets after mergers, seeking unified console visibility across business units. Their rationale emphasizes analyst efficiency rather than raw blocking accuracy, so vendors highlight case-management and SOAR integrations. Owing to longer procurement cycles, enterprise renewal waves produce lumpy revenue but high lifetime value. Solution roadmaps that align with NIST 800-207 zero-trust mailflow garner traction because CIOs want controls mapped to federated identity frameworks.

By Security Type: ICES Disrupts Traditional SEG Market

Secure Email Gateways still held 37.60% share in 2024; however, ICES recorded a 21.90% CAGR that will tilt the balance by 2027. Analysts predict that the email security market share for API-based ICES could overtake legacy proxies as soon as 2028. SEG appliances struggle to inspect TLS-encrypted traffic without breaking sessions, whereas ICES tools ingest mailbox telemetry post-delivery, enabling retrospective detonation and conversation-thread rollback^{[2]SlashNext Inc., “2024 State of Phishing Report,” slashnext.com}. 

Encryption, archiving and DLP sub-segments continue steady single-digit growth driven by HIPAA, PCI-DSS and MiFID II retention rules. Spam filtering has become commoditized—often bundled into suites—pushing standalone providers to reposition around AI enrichment layers. Vendors differentiate by mapping MITRE ATTandCK tactics for email, offering phishing risk scoring at user level, and feeding those scores into conditional-access policies that quarantine compromised accounts.

Note: Segment shares of all individual segments available upon report purchase

By End-user Industry: Healthcare Drives Compliance-Led Growth

Healthcare’s 17.00% CAGR stems from proposed HIPAA updates that finally require encryption of protected health information and mandate MFA on all user accounts. Hospitals and insurers adopt ICES coupled with automated encryption gateways to satisfy data-at-rest and in-transit requirements. They also use role-based message classification so caregivers can share lab results securely without over-encrypting mundane traffic. 

BFSI retains 27.80% revenue share due to high-value wire-fraud risk, but growth moderates because most banks completed SEG rollouts years ago. Manufacturing, energy, and utilities see rising adoption as operational-technology teams extend zero-trust principles to plant-floor mailboxes that were previously isolated. Government and defense agencies specify Common Criteria-certified solutions or FedRAMP Moderate SaaS to meet clearance thresholds, creating barriers to entry for new entrants without accreditation.

Geography Analysis

North America generated 41.60% of global revenue in 2024, propelled by the region’s USD 92.31 billion cybersecurity spend forecast for 2025 and an average 1,636 weekly attack attempts that keep email risk front-of-mind. United States buyers lead consumption of AI-native ICES products, helped by abundant security budgets and an advanced threat landscape targeting critical infrastructure. Canadian enterprises increasingly mirror US compliance frameworks, adopting NIST core controls and selecting SaaS providers that guarantee local data residency in Toronto or Montreal.

Asia-Pacific is the fastest-expanding geography at a 14.60% CAGR. SMEs across India, Vietnam and Indonesia leapfrog legacy gateways, moving straight to cloud email security market offerings because 94% already rely on SaaS productivity suites. Japanese and South Korean conglomerates adopt AI-driven language models fine-tuned for local scripts, while Australian public-sector agencies enforce Essential Eight maturity levels that prioritize email authentication and content disarm. China’s market evolves within a parallel technology stack shaped by domestic encryption standards and cross-border data-transfer limits, creating demand for ICES products that support commercial versions of S/MIME and SM2 algorithms.

Europe posts steady mid-single-digit growth, with compliance acting as the prime catalyst. NIS2 extends obligations to small municipal utilities and mid-sized manufacturers, pushing thousands of firms to implement email encryption and incident-reporting automation ^{[3]European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, “NIS2 Directive Implementation Guidance,” enisa.europa.eu}. Germany leads adoption thanks to well-established BSI guidance, while France prioritizes SecNumCloud-qualified SaaS for sovereign workloads. Post-Brexit, the United Kingdom pursues its Cyber Resilience Bill, aligning closely with EU rules but adding stress-test requirements that encourage scenario-based phishing simulations.