You may have seen a lot of encryption news lately, and you aren’t alone. According to Hoffman & Hoffman Worldwide the level of interest in encryption and the number of encryption-related news articles are at an all-time high. What’s causing all the attention? A few things:
Increased Breaches
As more breaches occur and news outlets increase their coverage of the issue, companies begin to realize, “this could happen to me.” When a breach occurs, the loss of customers’ trust is not only damaging to the company’s reputation, but also to their bottom line. According to the Ponemon Institute’s 2014 report, the average cost of a security breach is $3.5 million. Data breach costs include direct expenses like engaging forensic experts and discounts for future products and services, as well as indirect costs like internal investigations, communications, and the extrapolated value of customer loss from turnover or reduced customer acquisition rates. The cost of a breach, both in dollars and time, far exceeds the cost of prevention.
Increased Audits
The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) is responsible for enforcing HIPAA regulations and they have publicly announced a renewed focus on audits, saying that the past year will “pale in comparison” to the enforcement ahead. From June 2013 to June 2014, there were nine resolution agreements that resulted in over $10 million in monetary settlements, including a record $4.8 million monetary settlement announced in May 2014.
Strengthened Regulations
As of June 2014, there were 47 states with their own data security/breach notification laws. As time goes by, the laws continue to get stricter. In July 2014, Florida began enforcing the Florida Information Protection Act of 2014. This legislation broadened the definition of “protected personal information” to include usernames or email addresses, in combination with a password. The new law also raises the maximum penalty to $500,000. Florida is ahead of the curve when it comes to information protection, but other states have shown no sign of easing up on restrictions.
The list of reasons to be concerned about security breaches is long and daunting, however the solutions are simple. We recommend joining the Zix Encryption Network. It’s a growing community of more than 10,000 customers that enables the automatic exchange of encrypted email for all messages between members. The best part is email sent to other members are delivered transparently; no portals or passwords, just email. For more information, visit http://www.zixcorp.com/zix-encryption-network/.
Why would you trust anyone other than the leader?
The title of “industry leader” is not given out lightly. Think of the reasons you trust the leading brands in your life, whether it’s for technology, healthcare, banking or consumer goods. Why should email encryption be any different?
The answer is it shouldn’t be any different. Gartner recognizes Zix as the industry leader in email encryption, and organizations should trust them to secure their sensitive emails.
Zix has over 10,000 active customers and they are trusted by some of the nation’s most influential institutions in healthcare, finance and government. If more than 2,000 finanical institutions and one in every five U.S. hospitals are using their solutions, they must be good.
Let’s break down why Zix is the leader in this industry and why so many organizations trust their solutions:
Transparent email encryption
With Zix, all customers are members of the ZixDirectory, meaning they can send secure email to each other completely transparently. The message arrives in the recipient’s inbox just like a regular email would; no portals, no passwords and no extra steps. No other organization can send encrypted email between customers automatically and seamlessly.
Automatic content scanning
Let’s face it, humans make mistakes. Zix’s automatic content scanning capabilities take this into account. Each outbound email is scanned for sensitive information (PHI, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc.) and if it is in the subject line, body or attachment(s), the email is encrypted. Although Zix offers organizations the ability to manually encrypt or to include a keyword in the email, Zix’s solution will always scan the email just to make sure sensitive information is encrypted. Comforting, right?
There are a number of other benefits to implementing Zix from their custom branded secure portal to their DLP quarantine and superior TLS support. To read more on the additional benefits of Zix email encryption solutions, please visit www.zixcorp.com. You shouldn’t settle for anything but the best.
Email Encryption with a Community Approach
With security breaches happening more and more across all industries, companies have started asking, “Why not encrypt every email?” The answer is simple: most professionals don’t have time for the extra steps that encrypting every email would require.
What if we told you there were no extra steps? No portals, no passwords, nothing. What if we told you we could encrypt every email and it would arrive in your inbox completely transparently?
The exciting news is that, with Zix, we can do all of this. The Zix Encryption Network is a growing community of over 10,000 organizations (all Zix customers) that enables the automatic exchange of encrypted email for all messages between members. In fact, about 75 percent of all the encrypted messages sent through Zix Encryption Network are sent transparently.
It really is as simple as it sounds. When you become a Zix customer, you are automatically a part of the Zix Encryption Network. You can send secure email to any other community member and it will arrive right in their inbox, just like a normal email would. If the secure reply did not include a blue banner indicating to you it was encrypted, you might not ever know that it was.
You many have thought ‘email encryption’ and ‘simple’ didn’t belong in the same sentence but they do now. The more people that join the Zix Encryption Network, the easier encrypted email becomes and the more secure all of our emails will be. You should join the crowd. Learn more at http://www.zixcorp.com/zix-encryption-network/.
Data Breaches Illustrate the Importance of Encryption
Data breaches continue to happen each day despite the tools out there to assist organizations in prevention. Here’s a look at a few recent email breaches:
Stanford Federal Credit Union | Stanford, CA | 18,000 victims
A Stanford Federal Credit Union employee accidentally included the personal information of members in an email. The personal information compromised included names, addresses, credit information and tax identification numbers. Read more here.
Inland Empire Colleges | Riverside County, CA | 35,000 victims
An employee sent an email containing the names, social security numbers and addresses of students to an external email account. Over 35,000 students were impacted by this security breach. Read more here.
St. Joseph Health of California | Irvine, CA | 11,800 victims
A St. Joseph Health employee accidentally sent unsecured PHI via an email attachment in February 2014. The file sent contained patient names, codes, statuses and more. Read more here.
the one thing all of these email breaches have in common? They could have been prevented with Zix email encryption. The outbound email containing PHI would have triggered ZixGateway’s DLP filters, automatically encrypted or quarantined the email for further review. If quarantined, an employee would have had the option to review the message before releasing to the recipient(s). All this means, with Zix, their mistake would have been caught and trust would not have been breached.
Using solutions such as Zix not just save organizations from reporting the breaches but it also saves them from the consequences of breaches including high fines, negative publicity and broken customer trust, all of which have long-term financial and relational significances.
Leave a Reply