Security is the buzz word at the moment and businesses are aware that email security is a necessity with all the recent breaches that have taken place in South Africa. The need for TLS (transport layer security) does a lot in the security of your emails, including helping to avoid data leaks, ensuring there are no unwanted eyes on your email contents and validating an email that someone has sent to you. Is TLS enough to keep your emails secure though?
What is TLS?
TLS intends to ensure the secure communication between two points. TLS on a web browser, we see the lock icon on the URL field of the browser which gives us peace of mind that when we submit our personal details such as credit card, date of birth etc, that our information is secure and cannot be intercepted when being sent between our browser and the webserver. The same is the case for TLS in email security as it ensure the secure communcation between the two web servers (sending and receiving).
Interesting Fact:
SSL or Secure Socket Layer is the predecessor of TLS
The assumption about TLS is that if you have it in place then your emails are secure and you have nothing to worry about but this could not be further from the truth. There are additional bits of information that the receiving server needs to ask to ensure that the mail that it is receiving is coming from a credible source and does not contain any harmful content, which can be achieved through other security protocols, but even this is not enough.
Cloud Email Security is the way to go
Your email is not only at risk of being intercepted and can be breached in a variety of other ways including business email compromise which involves using email fraud to target organisations to make overseas payments, typically with organisations that have suppliers abroad, Email account takeovers, social engineering attacks and malicious software and URLs.
When protecting against these types of criminal activities, TLS is not enough. This is where a cloud email security solution comes into play. These solutions use machine learning to understand your email habits and the types of emails you receive and mark as safe, in order to protect you against potentially malicious emails. In addition, these solutions alert and automatically quarantine your emails from your inbox and your entire organisation to protect you and anyone else that may be exposed to the threat.
Not all email security is the same though, but we have the right one just for you.
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