3 Important Reasons
Email encryption protects the contents of your emails from outsiders. When an email is encrypted, it’s no longer readable until it’s unlocked and decrypted. Email encryption services provide a specialized security to protect the confidentiality of both your emails and any attachments while they are in transit or storage.
Emails that aren’t encrypted are vulnerable to attackers looking to steal proprietary or financial information. They are looking for Social Security Numbers, login credentials and bank account numbers to sell on the Dark Web. If they obtain your login credentials, they can take control of your email, or your company’s network.
Unless your emails are encrypted, hackers also have access to the attachments you send in emails. Email encryption helps you verify the authenticity of a sender of a message. You and your employees will know if you’re being spoofed by a hacker who is trying to impersonate someone you know in a phishing email.
3 Reasons Why Encryption Is So Critical for Businesses
- Internet Privacy Is Increasingly Complex
The information highway is getting harder to regulate. Data is coming and going from a variety of places. This makes it more difficult than ever to differentiate legitimate and non-legitimate sources. Encryption helps businesses better navigate this increasingly complex web and ensures that company data is secured – both in transit and in storage.
- Hackers Are More Sophisticated Than Ever
As the cybercrime landscape becomes more complex and dangerous, malicious hackers are getting better at what they do. Every day they are finding new and more sophisticated ways to infiltrate business networks and dupe users into providing unauthorized access. Encryption offers an additional layer of strategic data protection to ensure that hackers won’t be able to decipher data, even if they manage to get their hands on it.
- It’s Mandated By Regulatory Entities
Finally, email and data encryption are becoming less of a luxury and more of a necessity. Depending on the industry your business operates in and the kind of data you process, encryption is often cited as a mandatory security feature. So, when it comes to data security, encryption isn’t always just an optional layer of protection – it’s a mandatory and critical component of regulatory compliance.
How Does Email Encryption Work?
All email addresses have a pair of keys associated with them. The keys are used to encrypt and decrypt emails. The public key is stored on a key server and is tied to your name and email address. Anyone can access it. A second key is your private key. This isn’t shared with others and is only known by you.
Email encryption utilizes public-key cryptography. When you send an email, it’s encrypted by the computer using the public key. This turns the email into complex, indecipherable, scrambled content that’s difficult to crack. Only someone with the proper corresponding private key can decrypt the email and read it.
This Sounds Very Time Consuming – How Can We Easily Encrypt All Of Our Emails?
Because it’s difficult for most to encrypt their emails, businesses rely on their IT service companies to provide this through an automatic encryption service. This way, they don’t need to worry if their employees are using email encryption – it’s automatically managed for them. Emails are set up to flow through a gateway appliance that’s configured to the business’s security policies.
What Are Email Encryption Services?
In the past, email encryption services were cumbersome to use. Both the sender and recipient had to exchange encryption keys before sending and receiving emails to one another. As a result, people didn’t want to take the time to do this, and employees simply ignored the organization’s policies. This led to breaches in security where sensitive and confidential data was exposed.
Today we have simple and secure email encryption services that are cloud-based. Key management is automatic without any added overhead for either the users or administrators.
The first time a recipient receives an email, a unique key is generated. Emails (including attachments) are encrypted using the recipient’s key.
Email encryption services are popular with businesses today because they send and receive so much confidential information:
- It prevents outsiders from intercepting any incoming or outgoing emails that are transmitted between servers.
- The content of the email itself is encrypted, so, even if an email is intercepted, it still can’t be read without a private key.
- Emails in storage are encrypted to prevent hackers from gaining access to their contents.
How Do You Use An Email Encryption Service?
After the process of encryption is complete, a separate notification email containing a link to log into a secure message center is sent to the recipient. It’s accessed via a web browser using HTTPS (certified for security).
After the recipient logs in, their encrypted email messages are sent to them for viewing. At this point they can reply to the email or download them for archiving on their computer, knowing that they are still encrypted and will be secure.
Isn’t Transport Layer Security (TLS) Enough?
TLS does provide a secure channel for data transmission and ensures that all content, emails, and attachments are encrypted during transit. This is referred to as Data-in-Motion Security.
But because TLS doesn’t provide security for data at rest (in storage), archived emails aren’t encrypted and are exposed to hackers. And sometimes, the TLS connections are terminated before the emails arrive at their final destination.
There’s no way to guarantee that TLS alone ensures email security. This is another reason why you should consider using an email encryption service.
Where Can We Find Email Encryption Services In South Carolina?
Cyber Solutions provides Email Encryption Services. Our cloud-based approach to email encryption ensures the security of your emails and attachments. It utilizes an Advanced Encryption Service with a 256-bit cipher, commonly known as AES-256.
Email Encryption Service from Cyber Solutions provides cloud-based outbound email encryption, with multiple policies that allow administrators to specify precisely which outbound emails to encrypt. Emails that match the policies can then be sent securely to our message center.
Is your organization using email encryption services? Have you been meaning to research encryption options, but keep putting it off? Take action: reach out to the team of IT experts at Cyber Solutions in Anderson, SC. Our team has the expertise and the experience necessary to help your organization find and implement the right kind of email and data encryption solutions.
