Managed Email Services for Business
Managed Email Services for Business
Safeserve Hosted SecureMail is an easy-to-use email encryption service that securely delivers confidential business communications and attachments.
Government and industry regulations, such as those posed by Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Gramm-Leach-Bliley, offer even more compelling reasons for corporations to increase the security of messages to help meet compliance requirements. However, existing solutions—such as server-to-server level encryption, public key infrastructure (PKI), and password-protected files—can be expensive and complicated to integrate and deploy for communication with parties outside of your organization. These solutions do not provide the flexibility, sophistication, or ease of use that corporate users need to deploy email encryption for external communications.
Safeserve Encryption is one of four distinct services in the Safeserve Hosted Services portfolio. The service enables users to send and receive encrypted email directly from their desktops as easily as normal email. Using a simple process, users can encrypt and deliver any business communication without complex hardware and software to purchase, configure, and maintain. Safeserve Hosted Encryption is deployed over the Internet, which helps minimise up-front capital investment, free up IT resources to focus on value-producing initiatives, and mitigate messaging risks before they reach the corporate network.
In traditional encryption systems such as PKI, certificates bind public keys to identities. Users must pre-enroll in server systems to receive a certificate, which is signed by a certification authority, so that they can send and receive secure messages.
Safeserve Hosted Encryption incorporates Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) technology in a managed service platform. Developed by Voltage Security, a Safeserve technology partner, IBE is a breakthrough in security and usability for message encryption. Safeserve Hosted Encryption eliminates the need for certificates and uses a recipient’s email address as the public key; IBE automatically binds the user’s identity to the public key and eliminates the need for certificates.
When a user sends an email message, it travels to the Safeserve network through a Transport Layer Security (TLS)-encrypted tunnel, and is automatically encrypted at the gateway according to rules created and managed within the Safeserve Key Server module.
When a message is encrypted, a private key for the recipient is created and stored in a security-hardened environment on the Safeserve network. The private key is made available to the message recipient when the recipient decrypts the message. The recipient does not have to pre-enroll to receive and decrypt the message. In fact, the recipient may have never received a prior email from the sender.
The Safeserve encryption process is entirely transparent to the sender, who does not need to do anything other than write and send the message as usual.
Upon receiving an encrypted message, the recipient authenticates their identity and sets a password to securely open encrypted messages from the Hosted Encryption service. Once this password is created, the recipient can use the same password to quickly authenticate and view protected email. Password-based authentication provides an easy and secure method to authenticate and verify a recipient’s identity.
After completing the authentication and password setup process, the recipient decrypts and views the message using the Voltage Zero Download Messenger. The Zero Download Messenger is a clientless, browser-based method that enables a recipient to have confidence decrypting and reading a message and its attachments and then to reply with confidence. Furthermore, the encrypted message remains in the recipient’s email inbox for access at any time.
