Email Encryption: An Emerging Data Security Solutions

Email encryption is a helpful solution that helps in securing the information of the email by encrypting data. It used an encryption key to encrypt the information that is communicated. Emails nowadays are not only used in corporate but also for personal communication. People may share personal and sensitive information.

If these emails are not encrypted, they can be accessed by unknown sources and can be exploited with wrong intentions. Businesses and corporate agencies are focused to adopt email encryption software that will help them to avoid thefts and losses of data. The email encryption solutions also prevent cyber-attacks on organizations.

What is mean by Email encryption?

Email encryption is a process of encrypting or disguising, the content of email messages. It helps in protecting sensitive information. As the message of the email is encrypted, it can’t be read by any person other than the recipient.

Why Email encryption is important?

Email is a very susceptible medium from where information can be easily hacked. When emails are sent from public Wi-Fi or networks, unsecured emails are at high risk of being hacked.

Encryption makes the content of your emails unreadable. It is sent in encrypted version only from origin to destination; the target audience can only read the content. Mail sensitive information including Social Security numbers, login credentials, or bank account numbers must encrypt their email.

Otherwise, hackers can have unauthorized access to an email account and can easily retrieve all the credentials sometimes they can even hijack your entire email account.

What are the types of Email encryption?

1. End-to-end email encryption

End-to-end email encryption is basically a system of communication in which only the communicating users from both ends can read the messages. This type of encryption is planned in such a way that it data can’t be read by other people than sender and receiver and it can’t be modified. Any third party cannot decrypt the message but can store them in encrypted form.

2. Gateway email encryption

An email security gateway is a service that helps in preventing the transmission of emails that target to break company policy. It restricts sending malware or transfer information with mischievous intent. So gateway email encryption must be there in computers and devices accessible outside the company so as to have end-to-end encryption of emails.

3. Hybrid email encryption

A hybrid encryption scheme is a combination asymmetric encryption scheme with the effectiveness of asymmetric encryption scheme. It is achieved using data transfer from unique session keys beside symmetrical encryption.

Risks of not having any Email encryption solutions

Email is a common way for businesses to communicate with customers and suppliers. Thousands and thousands of emails are sent every day regarding invoices, contracts, and important business papers and documents across the globe. If the email is not secure, there are high chances of data exploitation by mischievous people like hackers. This may expose critical information of the organization and infrastructure to risk.

What factors boost the adoption of email encryption solutions?

1. The high demand for email encryption

With the increasing technology penetration in small and medium scale industries are nowadays using Emails to communicate. This is the key factor of the high demand for email encryption solutions. As a result of this use of e-mail has been increased for sharing information among employees and clients. E-mails that carry confidential data to be protected from manipulation and data theft.

2. Increasing demand for cloud-based services

As the companies are highly adopting cloud, the deployment of cloud has witnessed an exponential spur. In addition to it, various small companies or start-ups are implementing cloud-based services more in comparison to big enterprises.

Data security is one of the significant aspects that hamper the adoption of cloud and public clouds among enterprises in the email encryption sector.

3. The increasing number of spear-phishing and BEC scams

With time, enterprises have been struggling with many advanced cyber-attacks such as email-based phishing and BEC scams, causing a huge monetary loss. In NEC, hackers aim to acquire corporate email accounts, spoofing employees and customers or partners for financial profits like allowing payment transfers to the account of cybercriminals.

Fraud practices such as stealing data in order to do spear-phishing for unauthorized purposes are growing with each passing day.

Bottom line:

The adoption of email in small as well as medium scale enterprises with an aim to share information amongst its customers and employees has increased owing to the penetration of email encryption technology. These emails often contain very private information which requires security against theft and manipulation.

In this article, some factors that are boosting the growth of the Email Encryption market have been explained above.