Meet Customer Demand and Boost Revenue with Secure E-Mail

 
Businesses and consumers are looking for secure e-mail solutions to provide sender authentication and protect their data.

Many ISPs have become proactive in the battle against viruses and spam, offering their subscribers free filtering services and antivirus software. This benefits ISPs by trimming bandwidth and administrative costs required to deal with these threats, but it doesn't bring in new revenue. Service providers, however, can offer as a subscription service secure e-mail with immediate benefits to users. At the same time, secure e-mail opens up new profit opportunities for providers, with only a limited investment.

Almost everyone has received suspicious e-mail: virus-infected attachments that appear to come from co-workers; messages that seem to have been sent by banks but are actually attempts to pry passwords and account numbers from the unwary; and junk e-mail disguised as chatty notes from friends or urgent business communications.

Most people are simply overwhelmed by the ever-increasing volume of such messages and have no idea how to separate the good from the bad--not to mention the truly ugly. More sophisticated users treat every e-mail message with suspicion, refusing to open almost all attachments and setting their spam filters to levels that don't allow legitimate e-mail through.

Although the paranoia is justified, it is taking a toll on how people view e-mail communications. As a result, businesses and consumers are increasingly looking for secure e-mail solutions to provide sender authentication and protect their data while it's in transit over the Internet. While not intended to solve the problem of spam, such solutions offer consumers greater peace of mind and allow businesses to ensure that proprietary information is not tampered with in cyberspace.

"Essentially, standard e-mail is less private than a postcard, and people are beginning to understand that it simply isn't suitable for transmitting confidential data," says Jeff Digrone, a network security expert. "Factor in the viruses, scams, and other issues and it's obvious the current system isn't working. My clients are all demanding secure e-mail solutions."

Many ISPs have already become proactive in the battle against viruses and spam, offering their subscribers free filtering services and antivirus software. This benefits ISPs by cutting some of the bandwidth and administrative costs required to deal with these threats, but it doesn't bring in new revenue. On the other hand, service providers can offer as a subscription service secure e-mail with obvious and immediate benefits to users. At the same time, secure e-mail opens up new profit opportunities for providers, with only a limited investment.

Secure E-Mail Made Easy

"Until recently secure e-mail systems have been a real hassle for the typical end user," says Bob Godfress, a corporate security consultant. "Encrypting messages required all sorts of convoluted procedures, and decrypting them was just as complex. Apart from computer professionals, no one really had a clue how this stuff works, and in my experience very few people used it. Even if they were officially or legally required to for business they'd just 'cheat' and send out plain e-mail."

Security experts say the ideal e-mail security solution uses asymmetric key encryption. Simply put, that means "locking" the message with one security key and then using another key to unlock it. The sender's key authenticates the sender and encrypts the e-mail message. After encryption, the message data is scrambled and unreadable until the recipient uses his or her own key to decrypt and unscramble the message.

Besides protecting sensitive data as it moves across the Internet, a good e-mail security system also offers proof that the message contents weren't tampered with, arriving in the recipient's in box with a time stamp and activity log. The recipient also knows that, unless the sender was horribly careless with his or her password, it really is Bill in accounting who's asking for the sales stats and client records, not some 14-year-old Siberian hacker.

"Secure e-mail is a great service that ISPs can provide to users," says Godfress. "Every client I work with is interested in secure e-mail, and while I can set it up in-house for them, they'd be just as happy to farm it out to their service provider. It's one less thing for big businesses to worry about, and small and medium-size businesses definitely don't want to deal with the anticipated hassle of administrating a secure mail system."

Designed with ISPs in Mind

But does offering secure e-mail add yet another level of complexity to the business of providing Internet services? Not if you pick the right solution. Sun Microsystems partner Echoworx enables service providers to deliver a secure e-mail service that integrates easily with an ISP's existing e-mail infrastructure.

"The solution requires no administration," says Alfonso Licata, vice president of business development at Echoworx. "The ISP is not required to perform any management of the system—it is truly plug-and-play.

"And this value-added service can be offered to anyone in the world who has an e-mail address, irrespective of which ISP provides the mailbox. The subscriber need not be an existing subscriber of the ISP's e-mail services, nor are they required to subscribe to a mailbox from the ISP."

ISPs can bundle Echoworx Secure Email with standard mailboxes or offer it as a premium service. Messages are encrypted at the sender's desktop and decrypted at the recipient's desktop. Senders can use the service to send secure e-mail to anyone. To sign up for the service, users simply visit their ISP's Web site. Account setup is a matter of filling out a few fields on a Web page. The necessary plug-in is then downloaded to users' desktops.

Echoworx has made sure its solution is easy to use. Composing a secure message is the same as composing a regular message: Users simply click a button labeled "Secure" before clicking "Send." A password prompt appears to authenticate the user and digitally sign the e-mail message, then the system automatically encrypts its contents.

If recipients subscribe to the secure e-mail service, they can open the message in their e-mail application just by entering their password. Otherwise, recipients receive a message linking them to a pickup center where they are asked for a password that has been determined by the sender in order to view the encrypted content.

"All of the technology is completely transparent to the user," says Licata. "They continue to use their existing e-mail software, so there is nothing new to learn. A subscriber can register for the service and be sending secure e-mail within minutes."

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