An email is nothing more than a postcard that makes its way through the internet in open plaintext. This makes it as secure as a seventy foot billboard sign, anyone who wants to read it can. The fifty year old technology shows its age when you realize that your private communication can be opened by Microsoft, Apple, the NSA, or worse yet, one of your competitors. You aren’t alone in this email debacle as 144.8 billion emails go out every day.
Sophos Global IT Security Manager Ross McKerchar said, “It’s surprising how many people aren’t aware how insecure email is. They are of course aware of spam for the annoyance it causes… Despite its lack of security, we keep using email because it’s become so ingrained in the way we do business, and it’s not going to be replaced any time soon. To get email security right, you should think about all the ways email can be misused and abused.”
Solutions range from the somewhat impractical (PGP and S/MIME), to the not totally secure (file encryption). Here are some suggestions to help protect you and your company:
- Implement a policy
- Educate Users
- Most important – Implement Email Encryption that…
- Integrates DLP, encryption and anti-spam
- Easy to deploy
- Detects sensitive data automatically
- Users will love (to use) - no noticeable changes for them
- Keeps you informed
The solution that we consider the simplest and least problematic has all of these features and more – Sophos’s own SPX encryption technology. It's time to upgrade this fifty year old technology and make sure your internal emails are really staying internal. Click here to learn more about this Deadly IT Sin and how VLCM and Sophos can help.
