Member Article

Protect your greatest asset without impacting daily operations

Almost all of business communication is conducted by e-mail and, for most companies, this means Microsoft Exchange, writes Dr Guy Bunker, SVP Product and Cyber Security expert at Clearswift, a global cyber-security company.

It is used to share important documents, communicate ideas and maintain relationships with colleagues and partners. As well as being fundamental to daily business productivity, email is used to exchange sensitive information, such as financial records or personally identifiable information.

All this information or data should be protected with the level of security that reflects its importance to the business. But the need to maintain control and secure information under one IT infrastructure should not be at the cost of business efficiency and flow of information.

Many companies have in place technology that monitors e-mail but does it go far enough? Organisations have to ensure that sensitive information is not leaked out inappropriately. If it fell into the wrong hands it could cause an organisation to be in contravention of the mandates that protect sensitive information.

With an increase of information breaches being associated with the ‘insider’ threat, it is even more important that all emails are checked as they travel around an organisation. And therefore this sensitive information is protected and controlled internally, prior to external communications.

There are different approaches to handling sensitive information. With most security software, if a person within the organisation is not cleared in the e-mail policy framework to receive certain information, the e-mail will be blocked. So, business is not flowing- it is being held up and in many cases such an email is then deferred to a manual process to clear the ‘stop and block’.

There is a new method of monitoring e-mail, called Adaptive Redaction that addresses this challenge. Redaction in itself is not new - picture a typed document with confidential words blacked out or redacted. What is new is the technology that has the ability to redact words and numbers in an e-mail, which can be tailored to the organisation’s specific security requirements The Adaptive Redaction functionality recognises and removes sensitive data as it passes within a company’s Microsoft Exchange network.

Keyword searches and regular expressions can be set up to detect inappropriate content sharing, imbedded malware and malicious executable file types, whilst identifying violations in e-mails or attachments. The difference with this approach is that the e-mail will be delivered but with the confidential information redacted and replaced with ‘xxx xxx xxx’, ensuring data within the Exchange environment remains safe (both from an internal as well as a traditional inbound and outbound perspective) and without impacting the flow of business.

The key to thorough protection of your information and assets is in understanding that e-mail holds a significant amount of your business critical data. The technology now exists to secure your internal and external e-mail communication, to offer more control and security of the company’s valuable assets without having to worry about the confidential nature of the contents, helping your business towards a better information governance strategy.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Clearswift .