Over the past year (and especially this week), data breaches have been a hot topic. When personal information is hacked, it leaves your business and clients vulnerable– facing potentially years of tedious work to gain back your hard-earned reputation. As digital risks become more widespread, let’s make sure you handle your business and client data with the security and sensitivity it deserves.
Why you need to encrypt your emails
With the recent data breaches, we explicitly recommend encrypting business emails that include client data or sensitive insider information, no matter your industry. Because email is commonplace in our personal lives, most of us don’t think twice about hitting the “send” button with little thought to its contents or attachments. Since encryption can come as easy as one click, encrypting messages and attachments becomes best practice, and here is why:
- Data breaches are a threat today.our technology becomes more sophisticated, so do hackers; taking security precautions— like encrypting your emails — is absolutely necessary.
- Your passwords aren’t enough. Even if they are 500 characters of nonsense long. Without encryption, a person or malware can potentially read your emails.
- Your recipient’s email provider server may not be secure. Your recipient’s email server could store messages in plain text, making it easy for anyone (or anything) to read.
- Email encryption protects your content. When you encrypt your emails, the text stored in the message and files are scrambled up both in storage and transit. Encryption is the only way to fully secure your emails.
Securing your sensitive documents
Our personal lives have been in the cloud since before businesses considered it an option for workflows. Music, movies, pictures, personal documents…it’s not uncommon to keep them stored in free cloud file storage.
However, sensitive business and client files should be cared for meticulously – with encryption both in transit and at rest, in addition to access and download limitations. As Tech Target writer Jo Harder advised in a recent blog post, insist on protection for your personal information when engaging in business transactions. Any document or communication that contains two pieces of PII/NPI that, when pieced together could identify you as an individual (like social security number + name or address + checking account), should absolutely be encrypted. “When asked for personal data, be sure to say no unless the entity can provide a secure mechanism for your NPI data.” Educate your clients that the client portal you provide through ShareFile is for their own digital identity protection.
While this may seem like quite a bit of work, consider that with ShareFile and our Plugin for Microsoft Outlook, encrypting your information is a one-click process. Which is much easier than getting back your digital identity after it is compromised or stolen.
To see how ShareFile protects your documents in transit and at rest in a simple, secure solution, sign up for a free 30-day trial (no credit card needed!) today.
