Love it or hate it, email continues to be one of the primary methods for sharing information between employees, clients, partners and other organizations.
On average, corporate users will send 34 emails per day and receive almost 100. If you’re like me, you use email as your primary way to send all of your daily communications. My emails and likely yours, include all types of information, from very sensitive contractual and product information, to resumes and other personal and private information.
Although email is one of the best ways to communicate information, organizations must also ensure that information assets are managed and protected appropriately and that sensitive information is not used or distributed in inappropriate ways. Once it’s left your corporate network, messages can easily be forwarded to other individuals who may not be aware of the security of the information. This poses both security risks and liabilities to the organization if the information isn’t handled appropriately.
Thankfully there are ways to better protect incoming or outgoing information. One great solution is using the Proofpoint Email Security solution together with Titus Message and Document Classification applications.
Here’s how it works.
Proofpoint Email Security solutions scan email and attachments for spam and viruses. They can also scan incoming and outgoing email for key words. As the administrator, you can specify the words, phrases or information that you’d like to use in the scan. If the appliance finds a key word within a message or attached document, you can then also specify how the email should be treated. As an example, messages classified “Confidential” by Titus Message Classification, could be picked up at the Proofpoint email gateway and prevented from passing through the gateway.
There are endless ways of treating the information at the Proofpoint gateway. Options include: encrypting the message; quarantining it for review; or refusal to pass it through. With the persistence of the classification information applied by the Titus Message Classification solution, sensitive and confidential emails can be picked up at the email gateway and treated appropriately even after it’s left your network.
For incoming emails, key phrases can be used to determine the sensitivity of the information passing through the gateway. Based on the key words or phrases found at the Proofpoint gateway, the message can be given a Titus Message Classification which will be present when it’s received by the intended recipient. The message will then retain the classification as it’s replied to or forwarded to others.
If you’re interested we have provided more detail in a whitepaper on how to integrate Titus products and Proofpoint. As always, your feedback is welcome in the comments.
