In today’s cloud-first approach to managing corporate infrastructure and running applications, more than 56% of global organisations use Microsoft for email. Whether using Microsoft 365 (M365) or Office 365 (O365), this shift to the cloud has supported an agile and fluid way of doing business for more than 250 million monthly users.

This paper reviews the capabilities Microsoft offers for organisations that have adopted Exchange Online Protection or Microsoft Defender for Office 365 and narrows down the required, supplementary email protection capabilities, as well as investigates the merits of an API-based architecture that provides seamless cloud integration with M365.