Modern organizations are facing a new wave of advanced, socially engineered threats—business email compromise, credential phishing, and increasingly, AI-generated attacks—designed specifically to evade traditional email defenses. As these threats grow more sophisticated, legacy secure email gateways (SEGs)struggle to keep pace.

To better understand the real-world impact of moving away from SEGs, Abnormal commissioned independent research from the AimPoint Group. The study surveyed and interviewed cybersecurity leaders at enterprises that had fully removed their SEG after adopting the Abnormal platform, offering direct insight into the outcomes of this transition.

59% Reduction in Administration Effort

Organizations using SEGs needed 1.4 FTEs per 1,000 mailboxes for administration. After moving to Abnormal, that fell to 0.6 FTEs.

91% Faster Incident Response

Abnormal reduces both the number of user-reported messages and the time to investigate them, saving $17,074 annually per 1,000 mailboxes.

92% Reduction in False Positives

SEGs generated false positives in 41% of investigations. Abnormal reduces this to 8%, saving $993 per 100 alerts.

$703K in Annual Productivity Savings

Abnormal’s graymail filtering gives time back to every employee, not just the security team, saving organizations an average of 70.4 hours/day per 1,000 employees, or $703,513 annually.

Only 6% of organizations reduced headcount. Most reassigned staff to high-value initiatives such as threat analysis, mobile security, and policy development.

“Nobody wants to manage a SEG. We took the people who had been doing that and created a new team for mobile security. They loved the change.”— Director of Information Security, Fortune 500 Retail Company