Hushmail Business Makes E-Mail Encryption Easy (
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E-mail encryption has been
around almost as long as e-mail itself, but due to quirky installation and
support requirements, the security technology hasn't been very popular with
many enterprises. Fortunately, the current crop of e-mail encryption products
and services includes options that are easy to deploy and use and that don't require a great
deal of IT support to operate.
One such easy-to-deploy
option is Hushmail Business, an entirely hosted solution from longtime e-mail
encryption player Hush Communications Canada. As a hosted service, the Hush offering
carries no client-side installation requirements. However, the company does offer an Outlook plug-in
that works with Exchange and automatically handles the authentication and
exchange encryption keys—something that used to be a major support headache. On the server end,
administrators need only configure a company e-mail domain with Hush to handle
the encrypted e-mail traffic.
This hosted arrangement
can be a plus or a minus, depending on your organization's particular circumstances and bias
toward maintaining servers on premises. Hush is working on an update, slated for
availability later in 2010, that would allow companies to choose whether to support encrypted communications for selected users rather
than the entire domain.
The basic business
account starts at $24 a year per user for 50MB of storage; a premium service offering
more storage (currently 250MB, soon to be expanded to 10GB) costs $48 a year per user.
In addition, Hush offers a free personal version of the service that has most
of the features found in the business product but tops out at 2MB of storage.
Other encryption
products, such as those from PGP and Voltage Security, cost several times Hush's basic price, so
Hush's main advantages are cost and speed of implementation, given that there is nothing that needs to be installed. The service will
interoperate with PGP e-mail, once the appropriate keys are exchanged. The administrative features
are spare, but that makes it easier for corporations looking to get started quickly with
encryption.
Using Hushmail
You have two options
for your e-mail client: Use Hush's Web client or download an Outlook plug-in. Whichever method you use,
all your e-mail can be archived for an extra $10 a month per domain—something new to the current version.
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