Enterprise email encryption without friction? Yes, it’s possible
Secure communication enables more efficient communication and the secure exchange of digital documents. It can also be a fantastic customer service tool and – crucially – it allows organizations to comply with a perpetually changing landscape of industry- and region-specific data protection regulations.
According to a recent Pulse and Echoworx survey, 90 percent of polled executives have gotten that memo and consider data and document security a priority to be addressed by allocating budget for email encryption solutions.
So, if money is (nominally) not the problem, what is? It mainly comes down to this: Pinpointing an email encryption solution that will be effective for a variety business use cases is not an easy feat.
What makes an email encryption solution great?
The short answer: it’s secure, flexible AND usable.
The long answer? It can be trusted, it’s customizable, it takes advantage of automation, and offers many authentication, encryption and delivery options that customers can count on. It also helps organizations fulfill regulatory requirements (e.g., data residency) and strengthens clients’ connection with customers, partners, and vendors.
The Echoworx Email Encryption platform ticks all those boxes, and a few more, including a consistent and familiar customer and end-user experience, extensive branding features, and support for 27 languages (and counting).
“Most companies in the encryption industry are pretty hard-coded: They have adopted a specific type of encryption and a specific type of user authentication. We haven’t limited ourselves like that, and this is what makes us so well suited for the enterprise space,” Echoworx CEO Michael Ginsberg notes.
Another advantage of the company’s email encryption solution is that it offers a cloud-based, fully managed, 24/7 SaaS experience, with no additional hardware and software that needs to be installed nor dedicated personnel that needs to be hired. Its “cloudy” nature also means that the company can easily and quickly meet rising send volume needs and offer services that will comply with specific regional data protection regulation.
“Because we’re in the cloud, we can use AWS data centers. We currently have a data center in Canada, the United States, Ireland, the UK, and Germany. If, for example, a Brazilian company or a Singaporean company should come to us tomorrow and ask for a data center in their country, we could mirror our encryption platform and make everything ready within three days,” Ginsberg explained.
Finally, another big difference between the Echoworx platform and other providers’ email encryption offerings is that for the latter, email encryption is part of or an add-on to a larger security product, while Echoworx is a pure play, dedicated email encryption provider.
“For us, email encryption is more than just a feature: it’s a business solution that can solve a lot of enterprise problems. Because we’re exclusively dedicated to it, we are capable of providing enterprises with a buffet of choices that makes sense for them today, and we are always working to make sure we’re in front of new developments in the encryption space,” he concludes.
“After all, email encryption becomes part of your email and messaging infrastructure and it is very difficult to replace. We work hard on offering a solution that enterprises can be pretty confident will last a significant amount of time after it has been adopted.”
Echoworx Email Encryption: A flexible business solution with a capital “S”
It is often (grudgingly) acknowledged in security circles that sometimes security must be partly sacrificed for better usability. But with Echoworx you can have the best of both worlds: a seamless, secure experience for organizations, their partners, vendors, and customers.
“Our customers are mostly very large global enterprises in the finance, insurance, manufacturing, retail, and several other verticals,” says Derek Christiansen, Echoworx’s Engagement Manager.
“When working with them, we must be sensitive to their needs. We do this by offering like-for-like encryption when we can, and by tailoring the integration of encryption to their existing flows.”
The onboarding is fully guided and the Echoworx team takes care of all aspects of the setup on their side. The only thing that the customer needs to do is direct any email that needs encryption to the company’s infrastructure.
“They can use their own data classification. That can be something as simple as an Office 365 rule. It’s also common to use a keyword (e.g., the word ‘secure’) in the email subject to route the message. We also have an optional plugin for Outlook that makes it really easy for senders,” Christiansen notes.
O365 “encrypt” button
The Echoworx Email Encryption platform offers eight secure delivery options that ensure that no message is sent in the clear and that every message can be delivered: secure web portal, S/MIME, PGP, PDF, attachment (PDF, Office and ZIP) and TLS (with automated fallback).
“Our customers love the secure portal option because of the prominent branding, the fact that it’s user-friendly and works consistently on any device – no app or special software is needed,” he says.
“A secure PDF or attachment encryption is great for customers who have durable media requirements (i.e., if they want the secure messages to remain in the recipient’s inboxes). This is also great for volume processing and works with automation.”
Secure PDF
Echoworx also offers multiple methods of authentication: OAuth access, self-registration, shared secret passphrase, single sign-on (SSO) via existing accounts and social connectors, system-generated verification codes, passwordless, and multi-factor authentication (MFA).
The Echoworx Email Encryption platform provides policy-based encryption, which allows customers to predefine the best encryption experience for each recipient.
“This goes beyond just setting a policy for the portal and the delivery of attachments – you can overlap policies and can simultaneously satisfy different business cases adaptively. In fact, even the recipient can have a choice in their own email delivery experience,” Christiansen explains.
“Recipients may not just be a customer – it could be really important vendor or partner. You can’t change their processes; you can’t tell them how to work. You have to accommodate the technology they use and make it easy for your own team.”
Features like secure guest messaging allows Echoworx’s clients to have their customers act on their own terms. Branding allows organizations to apply their unique brand elements automatically, comply with jurisdictional rules and regulations, and increase customer trust.
Branded message
Conclusion
The Echoworx Email Encryption solution is not just about helping customers encrypt their messages without friction, but also about driving new business, helping customers preserve relationships with their outside organizations (as well as customers), and helping them meet regulatory requirements.
Every customer is different, and you don’t want to treat anyone like they’re an exception and give them a lesser experience.
“My focus is to help our clients meet all their compliance and onboarding goals. And what’s interesting is that once the decision is made to go with Echoworx, every onboarding always starts with the same top priority and that’s the user experience,” Christiansen shares.
“Our platform has been specifically engineered to provide that great and consistent self-serve experience across different devices and platforms because, at the end of the day, encryption should be easy.”