While encrypted email is on the minds of those working at enterprise level corporations, large companies aren’t the only businesses that should be taking a hard look at securing their inboxes. Small businesses and startups have just as much (if not more) to lose from a potential email hack.
Trying to figure out if encrypted email is something your small business should adopt? The short answer is yes, immediately. Read on to find out why.
1. Encrypted Email Helps Protect Financial Info
For small businesses and startups, your email accounts are often filled with invoices, bills, pay stubs and all kinds of other juicy tidbits hackers would love to get their hands on. While most of us know that it isn’t a good idea to store bank account information and credit card numbers in our inboxes, you don’t necessarily need the numbers themselves to do some serious financial damage to a business or individual.
Encrypted email can protect you (and your clients) by keeping financial information out of the hands of criminals. Even if your account is hacked, your email will be unreadable to the attacker, preventing them from digging through a goldmine of data.
2. Email Recall: The Best Addition to Encrypted Email, Ever
For many small businesses, HR can be a bit of a nightmare. There are so many things that can go wrong when it comes to dealing with employees — all of which could potentially cost you money. What if someone accidentally sends insurance information the wrong employee? What if your HR manager’s inbox is hacked?
Encrypted email through a service like Virtru not only encrypts your email — it also allows you to recall the secured email at any time. This means that if your HR manager accidentally shoots an email to Sam Smith instead of Bob Smith, they just have to click a button and the email will be immediately recalled.
Not only will this prevent some embarrassment, but it also might potentially save your company from a costly lawsuit. Remember, through HIPAA employers do have a responsibility to guard protected health information, which could include health insurance data sent from your HR department.
3. Encrypted Email Can Help You Stay Compliant
Depending on what kind of business you’re running, HIPAA might be just one of your many compliance worries. Are you working with financial data? You likely have to maintain GLBA compliance. Are you in education, or a field that deals with student records? You have to worry about FERPA. Do you deal with credit card information? PCI compliance is something you need to keep in check.
All of these different compliance metrics require you to do the same thing: protect the data of your employees and customers. In every case, encrypted email can help you do just that, preventing accidents, and preventing data breaches in the case of a hacker breaking into your system.
Virtru Makes Email Encryption Easier Than Ever
Virtru allows anyone to have access to easy to use, client-side encrypted email. Unlike other forms of encrypted email, like PGP, S/MIME, and portal systems, Virtru is user friendly, and it doesn’t require a degree in computer science to use.
Virtru works with Outlook, and Gmail, meaning that you don’t have to force your employees to ditch their current email addresses to enable encrypted email.
Try Virtru today and see how easy it is to lock down your inbox.