Email compliance refers to ways organizations comply with various federal, state, and local privacy laws regarding protecting personal information within the email channel.
Complying with various mandates, including CAN-SPAM, GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and PCI-DSS, requires organizations to enable email security protection layers to ensure any regulated data sent through email is encrypted. Email encryption, data tokenization, email archiving and retention, anti-spam, and data loss prevention (DLP) are examples of email security controls organizations must enable to become compliant.
Understanding Email Compliance Requirements
“Data privacy regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) restrict companies from sharing personal data through the mail without proper security measures like encryption, access controls, data retention, log files, and reporting features in place to protect PII or PHI.”
“For instance, a violation of GDPR can result in a fine of up to 20 million euros or 4% of the company’s global annual turnover, whichever is higher.”
You are fully responsible for email compliance; disregarding these requirements can have serious consequences.
Email compliance constantly changes due to new laws and regulations. New advanced adversarial technologies and data privacy threats contribute to this challenge. For example, cyber threats like phishing and ransomware continue to become more challenging to detect and prevent.
Key Features of Email Compliance Software
Several email security adaptive controls are required to meet various email compliance mandates.
Email Archiving
Email archiving is mandated for FINRA and other financial compliance mandates. Archiving systems keep an original copy of the email message for a period of time established by the organization’s retention policy. Organizations often put specific emails and documents on legal hold indefinitely during a lawsuit, bypassing the retention period.
Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
DLP is a critical email security adaptive control. Mandated by several compliance regulations, including HIPAA, PCI, and GPDR, DLP scans outbound email communications looking for sensitive data, including medical record numbers, social security numbers, and credit card information. DLP policies either block the outbound message or encrypt the message.
Antispam
Congress enacted the CAN-SPAM Act to regulate unwanted commercial electronic messages. This act mandates the Federal Communications Commission to establish rules for commercial emails and specific texts sent to wireless devices like cell phones—not all emails. Organizations must ensure they can block outbound spam messages from being sent within their domain.
Email Encryption
Email encryption is a required security protection layer to meet several compliance mandates, including HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI-DSS. Any outbound messages, including personally identifiable information (PII), must be encrypted, and credit card information must be encrypted or tokenized. Healthcare organizations looking specifically for HIPAA compliance should explore our guide to choosing the best HIPAA-compliant email encryption solution.
Types of Email Compliance Software
The email security marketing has several vendor offerings, each containing email security controls to help organizations meet compliance mandates. These offerings have similarities and differences. As organizations review the various offerings, ensure your compliance and email security, and develop a success critical plan of time. Creating a vital success plan should be mapped with email security control and aligned with the correct compliance mandate.
Trustifi
Trustifi, recognized as a global leader in email security for the small-to-medium and mid-enterprise business sectors, delivers exceptional integrated email compliance protection layers under one management console. Trustifi’s full-compliance offering comes with predefined compliance rules available, including GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and COPPA, with a single click. Organizations looking for ferpa violation examples can also benefit from Trustifi’s compliance coverage. Organizations looking for ferpa violation examples can also benefit from Trustifi’s compliance coverage. This ‘single-click-to-comply’ feature simplifies the compliance process, making it ideal for organizations with small SecOps and IT operations teams.
Mimecast
Like Trustifi, Mimecast is a market leader within the email security space. Their solution includes several protection layers, including email encryption, DLP, anti-spam, and anti-malware protection. Mimecast does come with pre-configured compliance templates. However, Mimecast requires extensive setup and configuration of its email security protection layers to help meet the various compliance mandates.
Proofpoint
Federal government customers, large corporations, and significant universities continue to prefer Proofpoint as their vendor of choice. Proofpoint’s solution portfolio offers additional email and cloud-based security protection capabilities. Specifically for email compliance, Proofpoint offers DLP, email encryption, and anti-spam functionality. However, many of its protective layer controls, such as email encryption, are complex and could be more user-friendly, potentially requiring additional training for your team.
Empower Your Organization by Choosing the Right Email Compliance Software.
Your selection for email compliance software comes down to your organization’s business and regulatory requirements.
- Which compliance mandates are you required to adhere to?
- Do you have qualified engineers with expertise in email compliance?
- Which security adaptive controls, including DLP and email encryption, have you enabled today?
- Are you using a third-party email archiving solution to help with legal holds and data retention?
- Are you relying on anti-spam protection from one of the email service providers?
- How do you compile your compliance reports?
- Do you maintain a proactive stance by continuously monitoring your email compliance status?
Most organizations have separate solutions to meet their email compliance mandates. Correlating the results from these tools is nearly impossible and requires additional resources and hours to complete.
Selecting the right email compliance software considers the following attributes:
- It needs to be easy to manage. For a deeper dive into evaluation criteria, read our guide on how to choose the right email compliance automation solution. Most security vulnerabilities and exploits occur because of misconfiguration, partially because of human error and overly complex configurations.
- The solution must ensure that the email compliance controls become centrally managed through a single console for ease of use and visibility of compliance status.
- The solution must contain the flexibility to add and turn off various compliance policies without affecting the users.
- The solution must come from an email security provider committed to promptly updating the various compliance adaptive control requirements.
Implementing Email Compliance Software
Email security engineers and administrators must account for some items during deployment when implementing email compliance software.
- Understand the laws and regulations to ensure the email compliance software settings align with these mandates. Suppose a specific adaptive control is required to meet a compliance mandate, which the current systems don’t support. In that case, the email administrator and security team must escalate this shortcoming to the senior leadership team.
- Ensure that you test all policies and enable adaptive controls ahead of time to ensure they work as expected. Using attack simulation templates focusing on data exfiltration is ideal for testing DLP, email encryption, and data tokenization protection capabilities.
- Validate that the reporting system is working to ensure all compliance reports are forwarded to the various stakeholders within and outside the organization.
Advanced Compliance Features
Many email security platforms now offer additional advanced features, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), security awareness training with attack simulations, and extended eDiscovery capabilities. With these advanced features, organizations are prepared to protect their users and systems from adversarial hackers attempting to hijack their tools and systems for cyberattacks.
Leveraging AI and ML for all inbound messages is a significant advantage for organizations wanting to detect email phishing attacks that seek to steal credentials, execute an account takeover, or deploy malware to take control of their victims’ devices. By controlling their victims’ devices, hackers can launch external attacks originating from their victims’ networks.
Note: Any compliance violation from a network taken over by hackers still falls upon the organization. Letting internal hosts become zombie platforms for hackers creates several possible lawsuits and a loss of coverage in cyber insurance.
Evaluating Email Compliance Software Performance
Evaluating email compliance software starts with clearly understanding the various mandates and requirements. Do the various email security platforms have one or many compliance mandates? How often do they update their platform with the latest changes or additional compliance mandates? Is there an extra cost for the compliance or regulatory updates?
Another critical component evaluation is verifying that the adaptive controls align with the correct compliance mandate and are operating as expected. How complex is the operational management of the email security platform in supporting compliance mandates? Does the upkeep of the email security requirement require extensive engagement with professional services, or can the setup be accomplished within a few hours?
Does the email security provider offer managed services to augment compliance reporting, incident response, and outgoing rules and policy updates?
These are the most critical elements when evaluating email compliance software solutions.
Future Trends in Email Compliance Technology
The key trends in the email compliance space are the greater automation of security operations tasks, greater scalability of protection services based on the threat or velocity of attack, and leveraging additional AI and ML.
Another significant development includes effective real-time monitoring, especially assisting compliance officers with the status of the organization’s current posture. This is especially important as more states and foreign governments continue to enforce privacy regulations and mandate new compliance frameworks to protect individual data.
Conclusion
Email compliance is crucial in business operations. It requires adherence to laws and regulations, security measures, and employee education. With proper knowledge and tools, businesses can manage email compliance complexities, safeguard data, and uphold industry reputation.
Based on the current risk landscape, compliance will continue to be obligatory for organizations in the future. The emphasis will be on organizations creating programs to evaluate threats, understand compliance laws, and collaborate with proficient professionals.
Implementing the right email compliance platform starts with clearly understanding your organization’s ability to deploy, operate, and sustain itself to meet the various complex mandates. Choosing a solution that is challenging to manage, expensive, and lacks the needed adaptive controls could create even more cybersecurity risk for your organization.
Why Trustifi?
Trustifi is a proven cloud-based email security solution designed to assist clients in meeting their complex compliance and regulations. Why does your organization trust Trustifi?
Because it just works!
Get Started With Trustifi Today – Easy, Affordable, and Comprehensive
Whether you are looking for an extra layer of protection in your existing email environment or a full-suite solution, the expertise and simplicity Trustifi offers will exceed your expectations. Let’s discuss pricing and a customized email security plan for you.
