When evaluating Messaging Security, what aspect do you think is the most important to look for?

Top brands don't mean best or most cost-effective. My advice is to look a bit further before you make a decision. Evidence suggests that most top brands are pretty good at detecting and blocking malicious attachments, best case letting through 1%, but can be worse than 50% when it comes to detecting malicious links in the text of the email.  There are numerous less well-known vendors with lower-cost AI-based solutions that have a far better success rate, also providing employees the ability to report on suspect emails which auto-removes them from other staff members' inboxes until they have been properly assessed. Some will provide a visual risk score to the recipient to give them advance warning to be more cautious. Combining this kind of capability with staff awareness products keeps your vendor list lower and further improves efficiency. For around £2 GBP per user per month (less than $3) we provide different vendors depending upon the customer's environment but provided as a managed service. This allows our customers to outsource some of the monitoring and day-to-day management, spread the cost on a monthly basis, and flex how many licences they need on a monthly basis too i.e. if you drop 20 users don't pay for them but if you increase by 20 you don't need complex co-termination and pro rata discussions.

I only can recommend Cisco because it´s the only one with which I'd worked enough. I think it is powerful enough and has a lot of possibilities. In addition, to a great support team. 

You should build a lab, try the tools and analyze the traffic and behavior with a traffic analizer like wireshark and any sandbox or edr that shows you what the tools do, but all this should be outside your production environment, use tools that has been released by the company provider and not third party downloads or unknown or untrusted sources.

One should 1st have details understanding of what he/she is looking to protect within environment as tool are specially designed for point solution. Single tool will not able to secure complete environment and you should not procure any solution without performing POC within your environment  As there is possibility that tool which works for your peer organisation does not work in similar way for yours as each organisation has different components and workload/use case

I agree with many of these observations.  A trend I noticed as a security professional was that putting bandaids on legacy technology buys little protection and the bigger your enterprise the harder it is to embrace newer safer technologies.  As an example, Microsoft Active Directory is entrenched in most organizations but is so complex and so relied upon it has become a major attack vector.  Newer offerings bring a compelling alternative but the difficulty in switching increases exponentially with the size and complexity of the existing environment.  Ultimately, even the cloud offerings (Web2) are being replaced by Web3 (blockchain-based) technologies offering Immutable file storage and backup today.

With zero trust, there are no boundaries, and nothing is inherently trusted. While clearly more restrictive, the benefit of the Zero Trust Security model is it creates a far more secure environment that protects against unauthorized access to sensitive data and digital assets.

4 common ways to avoid phishing attacks that you should know: 1. Don’t click on web links received in emails 2. Personally verify the sender's identity 3. Protect your accounts & passwords 4. Use managed email security