A StrongestLayer POC is not a detection bake-off. It is a diagnostic of your actual threat surface. Deploy in 15 minutes, observe for one week, and walk away with a 44-subtype threat map, a stacked-technique analysis, and a FAIR-grade risk number your CFO can use.
Three steps: authenticate, pull users, configure settings. The process is the same on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. Read-only access, no MX changes, no new agents. Protection starts at full strength on Day 1. No baseline learning period. No soak time before the model is useful.
For the observation period, StrongestLayer runs in read-only mode alongside your existing SEG. We see what you see. We generate detections in parallel. Nothing is quarantined, nothing is released, nothing is changed. Your users never notice. Your admins never touch it.
Email analysis runs on your inboxes via read-only API access to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. The reasoning engine records a verdict for every message. Your existing mail path, your third-party gateway if you run one, and your native Microsoft Defender or Google Workspace protection all continue to own delivery. Inbox Advisor stays off for the POC so users see nothing change.
At the end of the POC period, you get a deliverable your team can walk into a board meeting with. Four sections. Each one changes how your team thinks about email threats, not just how many they caught.
A tally of "things your incumbent missed" is a commodity deliverable. Every email security vendor can produce one. The StrongestLayer POC report is built to answer a harder question: where is your real threat surface, and why can your current stack not see most of it? The sections below are rebuilt from a real customer engagement, illustrative counts preserved.
Across 5,000 catalogued detections, 56.8% of attacks use four or more evasion techniques simultaneously, averaging 4.11 per detection. Each technique defeats a different defense layer. No single rule catches the full chain. The report shows you the chains, not just the endpoints.
Cyrillic characters bypass keyword filters at the encoding level. No signature or ML model trained on Latin text detects the mismatch. Each subsequent technique defeats a different fallback layer. The stack is not accidental, it is engineered to cover every plausible defense a mid-market SEG can raise.
Cloud-hosted payload on Amazon S3 is trusted infrastructure; reputation engines allowlist amazonaws.com. CAPTCHA prevents sandbox detonation. Clipboard hijacking delivers malware without any visible download. Four techniques, zero rule overlap with the SUMUP variant.
The ROI page uses the FAIR Institute methodology: probability-adjusted loss events, calibrated to your tenant size and observed threat mix. This is the same framework used by Fortune 500 risk committees and cited in Verizon DBIR and IBM Cost of a Data Breach. Not a vendor estimate. Not a guess.
Sources: FAIR (Factor Analysis of Information Risk) methodology. Category success rates derived from FBI IC3 2024 Report (BEC 5.4%), Sophos State of Ransomware 2024 (Malware 4.1%), Verizon DBIR 2024 (Credential Harvest 3.2%), IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024. Base loss values reflect industry-standard incident cost estimates scaled by evasion sophistication tier. Conservative estimate applies 0.6x modifier; aggressive applies 1.4x modifier.
Even if you do not buy StrongestLayer, the POC changes what your team knows. Four things, each of which outlives the engagement.
Most security programs still triage to two buckets: phishing and BEC. Our report shows you the 6 categories and 44 subtypes your inbound traffic actually contains, and which cells of the matrix are lit up in your tenant.
The stacking analysis shows which attack families chain 4 or more techniques together, and which layers each technique defeats. This becomes a benchmark your team can use against any vendor, now or in the future.
A probability-adjusted annualized risk number, with conservative, median, and aggressive bounds. Built on industry-standard loss data. Not "trust us," not a vendor estimate. The same framework your risk committee already uses.
Top threats ranked by Apex and Advanced tier first, with MITRE mappings, indicators, and the specific defense layer each one evades. Your team can take this into a sprint regardless of the vendor decision.
Fifteen minutes of your admin's time, one week of observation, a full report your team can walk into a board meeting with. No commitment past the POC window.
Tomorrow's Threats. Stopped Today.
