Managing Email Encryption Effectively in Your Business

Encryption Features    | April 23, 2024

Today, we’re diving into email encryption management, offering crucial insights for security managers.

Securing business emails via encryption is about more than just adding the technology; it’s integrating it seamlessly, ensuring compliance, and enhancing security and workflows.

Regrettably, industry discussions often focus on features, functionality, and capabilities, overlooking the crucial aspect of mastering effective email encryption management. Worsened by budget limits and specific solution restrictions, as shown in Mimecast’s 2024 Email & Collaboration Security Report. It found that to cut costs, over a third of organizations report being unable to invest in cybersecurity solutions, limited to what’s offered in Microsoft 365’s E3 or E5 packages.

Mastering email encryption goes beyond a simple toggle—it requires strategic scaling, strict adherence to SLAs, driving growth, and enhancing processes for efficiency.

Here are some key takeaways from our webcast on, mastering email encryption, for those looking to efficiently manage and utilize email encryption, especially the Echoworx Email Encryption platform:

Onboarding: Setting Up Your Service

The onboarding process ensures the success of email encryption initiatives. Effective onboarding requires comprehensive service configuration, branding alignment, privacy policy review, and preferred delivery method establishment. IT administrators must configure mail flow, create gateway rules, and manage certificates and private keys. These measures strengthen the email infrastructure, ensuring integration with existing systems and compliance with standards like PCI certification.

Reporting: Live, Automated, Scheduled

During the webcast, experts highlighted the Echoworx platform’s extensive reporting capabilities as a standout feature. These capabilities encompass “live” web-based, automated, scheduled, and SIEM-integrated logging reports. Users can monitor message activity, access detailed policy reports, and analyze message analytics and user activities, providing security managers with unparalleled insight into encrypted emails. This visibility is crucial for evaluating the effectiveness of email encryption strategies and pinpointing improvement areas.

A financial institution used Echoworx’s reporting tools to identify unauthorized email forwarding. The security team examined policy reports, resolved the issue promptly, strengthened email protocols, and prevented potential data breaches.

Support: Self-Service and Administrative

Effective support mechanisms, such as self-serve features and knowledgeable help desks, are crucial for a secure, efficient email environment. Research among IT professionals and decision-makers shows a key insight: encryption is a priority for organizations, yet less than half extensively use it due to its complex management. This highlights a wider cybersecurity challenge, especially with the limitations in popular software like Microsoft 365.

Despite Microsoft’s strong protections, its native security measures often fall short. Almost one-third of participants in the Mimecast survey reported that Microsoft 365 security applications failed to block Business Email Compromise (BEC) and spoofing attacks. This issue offers a chance for security professionals to distinguish themselves by adopting customized encryption strategies.

By using automation, managed services, and additional security solutions, organizations can greatly improve efficiency, addressing the shortcomings of native security and simplifying encryption management.

Echoworx highlights the importance of self-service for user account management, message recall, and account suspension. Additionally, receiving thorough training and support for updates and changes reduces IT team burdens and improves user experience.

BYOK/CYOK: Administrative Control of Your Data

With the increase in cloud adoption, questions about its security, particularly regarding encryption, become more prevalent. In recent years, significant strides in enhancing security measures have been made.

Echoworx has taken a pivotal step towards bolstering its data protection by adopting a Hardware Security Module (HSM) framework and leveraging AWS’s Key Management System (KMS). This approach not only secures information encryption but also integrates advanced key rotation and management techniques directly in the cloud.

The focus has shifted towards empowering customers with greater control over their data security, particularly through the innovative “Bring Your Own Key” (BYOK) and “Control Your Own Key” (CYOK) concepts. These strategies offer tailored key management, allowing clients the flexibility to manage their encryption keys according to their specific security needs.

By leveraging cloud-native tools and adhering to strict security protocols, a new benchmark in secure data management is being established. Clients have complete autonomy over their data security and encryption processes, ensuring their information is encrypted and secure.

Encrypting business emails is not just about using the technology; it requires smooth integration, adherence to compliance, and improving both security and workflows. The Echoworx platform underscores this by focusing on efficient management for encryption success, notably through self-service and administrative controls. Its commitment to BYOK and CYOK strategies reinforces the move towards increased control, which is crucial for secure encryption practices.

Watch our “Mastering Echoworx Email Encryption: From Setup to Advanced Management” webcast to learn more.