How to implement cloud email security for data protection

Victor Maia
SaaSholic
Published in
4 min readJun 30, 2020

Email security mainly included techniques and safeguards methods to protect your critical data while communicating with different businesses outside and inside your office premises. With more companies moving towards SaaS Platform, security has become necessary. Data loss, unapproved access, and compromise on security can be avoided with the right steps taken for email security. Email is popularly used to launch different types of attacks on business-like -

  • Malware attacks
  • Phishing attacks
  • Descriptive messages
  • Hyperlinks to infected pages
  • Ransomware

Above mentioned are just a few of the attacks that you need to keep in mind for keeping your data and enterprise network safe from letting the wrong person in. For the same, there is a need to put different checkpoints before sending and receiving the emails.

In the current business scenarios, all the exchange of information is done via mostly emails. The benefits of using emails outweigh the risk involved in it. Your monthly sales reports, business strategies data, and many other aspects are necessary to protect while sharing with colleagues over the emails. All this is at risk of clicking a single wrong link or falling prey to other scams.

Let’s see how we can protect our emails

Email security can implement at three stages

  • Sender
  • Receiver
  • Email Encryption and AI systems for detection and safeguarding in real-time

Precautions before sending emails

If employees are trained enough to know the best practices before sending an email reduces the risk of email breach and data leaks. The points are following -

  • Use strong passwords and regularly change passwords
  • Use of email encryption services for securing sending the data
  • Following the best practices for using and access data on BYOD
  • Ability to logins securely on different devices
  • Email Scan functionality after including links and attachments
  • Implementing data loss protection solutions for data loss
  • Spam domain analysis

If employees are trained from time to time then it becomes easy to avoid and identify the threats on a regular basis.

Precautions before sending emails

Employees should also pay attention before opening any suspicious email which they have received in their inbox. Some of the best precautions are the following:

  • Avoiding clicking on links from senders you don’t trust
  • Strong passwords and change them from time to time
  • Refrain from sharing your user Id and Passwords with coworkers
  • Try sending as little as possible sensitive data reducing the exposure
  • Double-check the recipient before sending the email

However, training your staff for all the best practices is not gonna be enough, as there will always be possibilities of human error. If you have trained your staff enough then you need to pay attention to other technologies solutions that provide a higher and much-integrated email security for protection and safety of data.

Features to include for Cloud Email securities

Apart from the users’ end, there are a lot of other security threats that should be detected and avoided. Some of the points are following -

  • Real-time threat protection using detection technologies
  • Predictive analysis for identifying the threats and leaks from happening
  • Availability of features like advanced malware detection ( Sandboxing )
  • Encrypting email for keeping the sensitive data safe while transmission (Real-time features)
  • Ability to detect and block infected websites and attachments

Unlike secured cloud storage, the unencrypted email brings a lot of possibility of attacks from hackers. Without this service, hackers can have access to your emails and steal the information which is only meant for your business and sell it to your competitors. Misuse of your data like credit card information, username, and passwords of your different accounts and identity theft becomes possible if security measures are not kept in places like email encryption services.

Looking at the benefits of the email encryptions, it will bring a lot of privacy. Your classified information can be kept safe and businesses can run without any security threats from outside and inside. Many companies also require a GDPR and HIPAA compliance and encryption of emails can provide and make your complaint of these rules set up by the government.

In terms of efficiency, you will not be required to use any other encrypting software. It will lower the pressure on your resources and will benefit in the cost-saving over the long run of the period. In the past, email encryption was used mainly by government and bank services, but with the time changing the need for the hour is to encrypt email even for small businesses.

In the end, the privacy and security features to protect your sensitive data is important for your survival in the market. No matter if you are a small business owner or a large enterprise the need for email encryption is for everyone.

About the author: Balli is a tech enthusiast writing on all sorts of things from WordPress, Encryption Technologies, HIPAA, to Lead generation. All his work is on his Technology blog. In his free time, he is either thinking about a new dish to cook or technology in the future.

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Victor Maia
SaaSholic

Unconventional Mind, Content Wizard, Marketer in the spare time