Kevin Baylor, Alliance IT. I wanted to take a moment to talk about a topic that has kind of come up over the past few weeks more frequently and that has been email encryption. We’ve got a client asking about how do they do email encryption. Should I do email encryption and if so, when?
Email encryption has different needs for all types of businesses, whether you’re trying to meet HIPAA compliance, potentially PCI compliance. Maybe your own internal policies are going to come into play with the email encryption.
Whether you’re using email encryption built in with Microsoft Office 365 or if you’re using a third party service for your email encryption, they all are going to act in different ways but yet with similar results.
You know, do you have automatic policies and rules in place to encrypt data that goes out in email that has to do with Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, any type of personal information? There are policies in place a lot of times referred to as DLP or data loss protection policies.
Do you want the users to be able to manually encrypt an email? You know, give them that option easily from Outlook and then there’s also the encryption of attachments. Do you have sensitive data going out in a PDF file? Do you just encrypt the PDF or do you encrypt the whole email? There’s not necessarily a right answer for every business but there are a lot of options and the biggest challenge for a lot of businesses is understanding your options and how to manage those.
Email encryption is very important for protecting data, even more so in today’s world of all the scamming and phishing that’s going on with credit cards and Social Security numbers and any type of personal information or even business information, checking accounts and wire transfers.
So you want to understand what the email encryption can do and how it best fits your business. You got any questions? Let us know. We’re here to help you. Kevin Baylor, Alliance IT.
