* Why CipherTrust watches outbound e-mail content
If one of your employees sends a customer’s credit card number, Social Security number or medical history through e-mail in clear text you could be in violation of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, California’s SB1386 or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), respectively.
Violation potentially carries with it loss of corporate reputation, a loss of intellectual property, fines or jail time. As a result, outbound content scanning has become a hot area for messaging managers, much like inbound content scanning (a.k.a. spam filtering) became a hot area a few years ago, albeit for different reasons.
To help an organization manage its outbound content, CipherTrust has released Compliance Control, which is both incorporated in the firm’s latest version of IronMail and offered as a stand-alone server. Compliance Control scans outgoing e-mail content for violations of regulatory, corporate or other policies and includes dictionaries for each major regulation, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, to scan for pre-defined content and patterns.
If a violation is found or suspected, suspicious e-mail can be forwarded to a compliance officer for review prior to their being sent, they can be archived, or other actions can be taken.
The focus of Compliance Control is on allowing compliance officers instead of an IT department to take charge of managing compliance. Osterman Research has found in its survey work that IT managers really don’t want the full responsibility of managing compliance and corporate policies, but instead would prefer that other parts of the organization get involved.
In addition to CipherTrust, a growing number of other vendors offer outbound content-scanning systems and services. Any organization, particularly one that deals with sensitive data like customer financial or health-related information, should put outbound content scanning high on its priority list – not to do so can result in significant problems down the road.
