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E-mail encryption is becoming a necessity for protecting sensitive information.

The sheer volume was the shocker. Cliff Gobin had figured it would be maybe a few dozen e-mails a month - only those carrying confidential patient information off the network - that would need to be encrypted once his hospital rolled out a secure-messaging capability to employees and affiliated physicians.

The actual number of e-mails being encrypted today: 1,000 to 1,500 per month.

"That's 1,000 or 1,500 messages that would have been sent clear text without the product, so we feel a lot better now than we did a year ago," says Gobin, director of IT security at Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston, referring to the Zix's Virtual Private Messenger (VPM).

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