The pandemic has ushered in a paradigm shift in how businesses communicate with their customers. As organizations in healthcare, finance, and other highly regulated industries rely more heavily on email communication, their employees continue to send sensitive data such as medical and financial information through email. This makes email privacy more important than ever, and there are several ways to implement it, but with varying levels of complexity.
The two primary ways to send a secure email are by encrypting the connection over which email is sent, or by encrypting the email itself.
Encrypting the connection is the simplest way to protect email privacy, and is accomplished using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS).
However, businesses in highly regulated industries such as healthcare and finance often must take extra steps to protect against accidental exposure of personally identifiable information (PII) such as driver’s license numbers, medical records, and other healthcare or financial information. To meet these requirements, businesses may use PGP, S-MIME or various other methods to encrypt the email message.
SecurityGateway’s Secure Messaging feature combines the rule-based configuration of most PGP encryption solutions with the simplicity of SSL and TLS.
When a user sends an email containing sensitive content, instead of sending it directly to the receiving mail server, SecurityGateway stores it on the secure email gateway server and the recipient reads it via a web browser over an encrypted connection using the Secure Messaging portal. The benefit of this method is that the emails are never at risk of interception by a hacker or other third party and the connection is not at risk of an SSL downgrade attack, which is an attack technique used by hackers to downgrade an encrypted connection to a plaintext connection.
SecurityGateway’s Secure Messaging service was designed to be easy to set up by administrators and easy to use by end users. Simply follow these three easy steps.
The first step in implementing Secure Messaging in SecurityGateway is to enable it via Setup / Users | Secure Messaging | Configuration.
