Email Encryption: Protecting Your Business

Email has become a primary communication tool among businesses today. Instead of snail mail and other types of offline medium, email can travel across different locations. Transfer of information is also easier and quicker. Due to the importance of email among businesses, many opportunists try to break into company networks to access emails. Business email often contains important and confidential information. This can give outside parties an advantage against the competition. If you want to make sure no other parties can access your company emails, think about using email encryption.

Importance of Encrypting Email

Securing emails remains a big challenge for many companies. There are many threats over the internet when you send your email. Other parties can also access your email through different points. These include transmission pathways, backups, firewall inspection, and other personnel authorized to view the file. Other than the email's text, other components of the email including attachments can be at risk. Protect the text and attachments altogether. If you do not encrypt your emails, other individuals or parties can intercept the email. Even the mere auto-fill feature for completing an employee's name can cause many errors and problems. Forwarding emails with long threads can also threaten your business. Most of the time, people included in the thread no longer checks or realizes who is receives the content. Email encryption software can prevent any confidential information from reaching unauthorized individuals.

Encrypting Methods

From email filtering to software, there are many ways to secure and encrypt your email. Depending on the level of security you need, you may have to use a different or several methods. Choices for encryption are as follows:

- Transport Layer Security - this encryption method offers gateway-to-gateway protection when using TCP/IP connections. In this setup, the sending and receiving parties should have TLS support to allow automatic encryption. It is also important to buy an infrastructure certificate. If not, there will be lack of notifications and encryption may become slow.

- Manual Encryption Methods - there are security applications allowing users to encrypt their message manually. One ways to do so is through adding a particular prefix. The receiver needs to complete several processes before they can open the email. If you want more flexibility in your encryption process, choose manual encryption. You may have to conduct extra training and perform additional steps with this approach. Get an additional interface as well, to accommodate your security software.

- OpenPGP - this serves as a standard for encryption of different types of content and attachment. OpenPGP works with asymmetric encryption keys requiring global directories and open source to function. You can send email to different recipients with each recipient getting individual decryption keys. This secures your email completely as each recipient needs a different and unique decryption to open your message.

You can use several methods to protect your email. Ask the provider about all possible options. It is also best to check if you can also employ a spam blocker.

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