Why You Need Email Encryption

Why You Need Email Encryption

Would you be upset if someone unintended read your mail?  What if the letter contained sensitive information?  Now consider email.  If you’re like many people these days, you send and receive literally hundreds of emails a week.

While we recognize that not all email is sensitive, there are times where you want to ensure the content of a message is kept confidential.  This is especially true if you’re sending information such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, or other personally identifiable information.  When this happens, consider sending an encrypted email.

Standard email messages are sent in plain text—which means anyone can snoop and read them.  If the email message is encrypted, the message is completely unreadable unless you have the decryption key.   A good analogy is locking a message inside a safe, and then shipping the safe—now you no longer need to trust the people who ship it.

There are several ways to encrypt email messages. Depending upon your needs and your business email service such as Hosted Exchange or Office 365, IT Radix can assist you in selecting the right solution.

Most email services by default secure the connection from your computer or smartphone to the email service only.  You can tell this connection is encrypted by the “s” in your web browser, e.g. “https://outlook.office.com.”  This does not mean the message itself is encrypted—it only encrypts the connection or the information in transit.  So, the email message is stored un-encrypted everywhere that email message resides—on both the sender’s and the recipient’s in-house or cloud mail server and on each individual’s computer and all the devices that their email syncs to (think smartphones, tablets, etc.)  These days, that’s a lot of copies of a single email message.  This means anyone—an employee, support vendor, or hacker—might be able to read your confidential messages.

Email is a fantastic productivity-enhancing technology, but you need to be more careful than ever about what you use it for.  Consider email encryption to keep data private.  It’s a great way to avoid being bitten by many of the cyber breach issues so prevalent today.

Want to know more about encryption options for your email?  Give us a call today!