It might not seem obvious but most companies have precious information, intellectual property, digital assets, and critical data in the email flow. Customers, vendors, employees, and all other stakeholders use email for communication so a lot of information ends up resident in email.
For some companies, there could be more: designs, research information, planning documents, company documents, financial details, etc. While most companies do invest in systems that scan emails for viruses, malware, and malicious attachments, the critical information that’s in these emails remain vulnerable. Here’s what you should do to protect your Intellectual property:
Know your threats
You can’t protect your digital assets if you don’t know where the threats lie. The first step is to identify the various types of threats. Malicious software or attachments, viruses, phishing emails, and malware are the usual types of threats. However, deploy systems to scan not just the inbound emails but also outbound emails. The solutions deployed should be able to scan both the body of the email and the attachments. Set up company policies in the line total vigilance and checks to guard your information flowing out through email.
Use Encryption. Enforce automated vigilance
The solutions you use for tracking and protecting your email should not disrupt your business as such. Yet, it’s expected to work all the time in trying to recognize email-based events when they contain intellectual property. Encryption is a tried-and-tested popular way to send emails, which have IP. Based on IP email triggers, encryption protects, blocks, quarantines, reroutes, or detects any threats on emails whatsoever. The usual encryption standards are usually S/MIME, OpenPGP, and TLS encryption.
Push and Pull encryption
Push encryption sends a secure email message to email recipients – as an attachment instead of the standard email. While recipients can view, read, and respond to these messages using any standard web browser. Another option, there’s the pull encryption which uses a secure staging server while notifying the recipient about the new message. In this case, recipients are to open a secure web-based mailbox to access the email.
Are you doing all you can to protect your intellectual property? Is your email security rigged up to protect your business from data leaks through emails? If you’d like us to help you, recommend a strategic approach to IP protection or have email and spam protection for your business, do let us know and we’ll more than happy to help you out.