White Papers for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

Regulations Shift Focus on Outbound Email Security

Proofpoint

Email is the lingua franca of business today. It is the conduit that allows employees to share information, companies to work with partners, and increasingly, provides a way for companies and their customers to interact. Enterprises today deal with an ever-increasing number of email-related threats. Most are familiar with the problems of virus-infected email attachments and productivity draining spam, but now companies must also address the threats posted by outbound email.
Outbound email and other electronic communications (such as web-based email, blog postings, FTP and other messaging streams) pose a significant risk for data loss or data leakage. Mitigating such risks is becoming increasingly important and complex with the introduction of new information privacy and data protection regulations that cover information exchanged internally, as well as with partners and customers. For example, the relatively new Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) and the Offi ce of Management and Budget (OMB) Personally Identifiable Information Guidelines (PIIG) place additional constraints on how data is stored, processed, and transmitted.
Compliance with these types of regulations—or simply adopting best practices for protecting the sensitive or
private information valued by your company, customers, employees and partners—adds a relatively new twist
to email security. Sure, one must still be vigilant against inbound threats, but now outbound mail needs to be examined to be certain there is no data leakage. This often involves setting up corporate data protection and privacy policies, encrypting confidential corporate and private personal data, adopting best practices to ensure the policies are used, monitoring for compliance, and demonstrating (to regulators and security auditors) that procedures are in place and working.

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