You need a way to keep users from e-mailing confidential data outside the confines of the organization, but conventional, PKI-based client mail encryption can be costly and complex. Fortunately, on-premises and cloud-hosted gateway systems provide increasingly appealing alternatives. In this report, we???ll explore ways to plan, deploy and manage a reliable, cost-effective and scalable e-mail encryption system to ensure your organization???s regulatory compliance and business data protection.

E-Mail Encryption: New Ways to Ease the Security Burden

E-mail is by far the most gaping security hole in nearly every organization’s defenses. More often than not, employees can e-mail sensitive organizational data anywhere on the planet with impunity, making your firewalls and all your other security efforts virtually worthless. What’s more, HIPAA, PCI and other federal and state data-privacy regulations keep coming, making it critical for you to enforce an internal security policy. Bottom line, you must find a way to wrest control of the e-mail risk assessment decision away from users, unearth and protect the organization from unsafe messaging habits and be prepared to prove compliance. 

But how do you architect and implement a robust and scalable gateway-based e-mail encryption system? And how do you integrate other technologies, such as data loss prevention, to extend the capabilities that conventional mail encryption products provide? In this report, we’ll address the critical planning, deployment and management issues to consider before kicking off your gateway messaging encryption project.

 

Table of Contents

    3 Author’s Bio
    4 Executive Summary
    5 E-Mail: The Corporate Data Escape Route
    5 What’s Wrong With the Old Way of Encrypting E-Mail?
    6 How to Architect a Gateway Encryption E-Mail System
    7 Figure 1: A Typical On-Premises Gateway E-Mail Encryption Deployment
    9 Opt for Cloud Encryption Services
    10 Figure 2: A Typical Cloud Gateway E-Mail Encryption Deployment
    11 Develop a Solid E-Mail Content Analysis and Encryption Policy
    12 Credit Card Data Complexities and Customized Dictionaries
    13 Up and Running

About the Author

Best Practices: SME Security

Randy George has covered a wide range of network infrastructure and information security topics in his six years as a contributor to InformationWeek and Network Computing. He has 15 years of experience in enterprise IT and has spent the past 10 years working as a senior-level systems analyst and network engineer in the professional sports industry. Randy holds various professional certifications from Microsoft, Cisco and Check Point, a BS in computer engineering from Wentworth Institute of Technology and an MBA from the University of Massachusetts Isenberg School of Management.