Understanding Email Encryption Options in Office-365

Are you afraid of the confidential data of your company being compromised at any stage?

The chances of data breach and cybercrime are not insignificant. Well, there is a solution available now with Office 365 for Email Encryption!!!

DATA Protection + DATA Encryption is the need of the hour!

The ground-breaking innovative features of Office 365 Message Encryption (OME) allow businesses to exchange encrypted emails in a secure form with anyone and on any computer.

It is a paradigm turn for the protection and partnership activities of any organization.

Office 365 provides a robust protection capability—Office 365 Message Encryption (OME), allowing the companies to safely transmit confidential details in an already reasonably vulnerable infrastructure.

Email encryption in Office 365 services is paired by OME with the Azure Privacy shielding’s rights management capabilities.

Data security is an unresolved component of corporate email strategies. It can be encrypted as one of the safest ways to preserve confidentiality. The recognizable metadata to encrypted data is a way to encode e-mail messages.

Only by using a digital signature, which fits an identical digital signature used only to encode an email message, could the recipient understand the message.

Without all the personal keys, a recipient who has captured or mistakenly received the message may not comprehend the message.

The professional way of working with Office 365 Encryption:

Office 365 Message Encryption is an Internet application that is part of Azure Privacy Security and exchange online migrations, focused on Microsoft Azure Rights Management (Azure RMS).

This requires encoding, identification, and permission policy to better protect your email. The messages can be encrypted by owning the rights to control.

• “Do Not Forward”- if using this option, an email sent is encrypted, and the receiver must be authenticated manually by the sender. With this option enabled, the recipient is then unable to forward, take a print or copy the message/mail from it.
• “Encrypt Only”- if enabled, an email is encrypted, and the receiver should be authenticated. By enabling this option, a recipient will have all the administrative rights except Save As and Export a file to another destination.

The new message encryption of office 365 gets crafted on Azure Identity security capabilities that facilitate any organization or a single user to send/ receive emails inside and outside the organization.

Some of the unique features of office 365 encryption are as follows:

1. It contains “Do Not Transfer Prototypes” and customized layouts for Business 2 Business and Business 2 Customers correspondence;
2. Email messages from Office 365 mailboxes sent to other customers’ independent of the email system vendor;
3. Automated encryption is possible, without any extra costly infrastructure;
4. The receiver’s email address used as a public key such that additional certifications are not required;
5. For improved protection, a comment in the string gets encoded easily;
6. Any computer capable of running Outlook on Windows, the Online edition of Outlook, can be used to send encoded emails;
7. Intermediate online providers or consumer applications are not mandatory as encrypted emails get forwarded to the receiver mailboxes;
8. Users maintain substantial scrutiny of the encryption method in return for their confidential data security.

How to use the office 365 message encryption feature?

With the help of “Information Right Management”-IRM feature, users can avail the facility of office 365 encryption in several ways:

1. Message encryption for every single messages/communication-

The Encryption function will be accessible in the Options menu for Microsoft 365 customers with this feature. It is how to trigger this-

• To establish authorization to use this object, click options > Encrypt and choose the rule to use. You can witness this feature in Outlook 2019.
• The Encrypt substitute is seen above the message for the Outlook accounts for the web users. Users can control their permissions once encryption gets applied by selecting the permissions change option. Subsequently, this setting can be open by clicking- Encrypt from the bottom of the message.

2. Encrypting the outgoing messages one by one, manually-

Follow the below-mentioned steps to safeguard all outgoing mails for the Outlook account users. There is a small catch here that the recipients would be required to decode messages with the sender’s digital signature only.

• To access the Trust Centre Configuration menu, please click on the File tab.
• Enable Encrypting contents and attachments in the Encrypted Email Protection tab for outgoing messages check box.
• From more configurations, install the security certificates.

Sending an Encrypted message via Office 365 Message encryption:

To send encrypted emails according to an organization’s (user) privacy theory, the following steps must be performed sequentially;

Click Options tab > Click Permission tab > Click Encrypt from the list of options.

Now, the next step is to open Outlook in the windows app or web: In the new message window; Click Protect from the menu bar > then click Change Permissions > A new small window appears, then choose the “Encrypt” message protection option.

What’s the new buzz is all about?

The new office 365 encryption keeps the email safe. But, the recipients as authorized 365 users can decrypt such emails automatically in a few simple steps.

In the past, users had to install the Workplace Message Encrypt Add-in externally and manually to encrypt emails if the user needed to give an encrypted post to anyone other than the parent company.

Users would have had the same satisfaction of securing communications within and without Office 365 using the new upgrades, making it difficult for the sender to be worried about selecting the ideal form of encryption.
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Final Verdict

The new Office 365 Message Encryption, as compared to Microsoft’s earlier models of OME, offers an integrated user interface by enabling the emails to be transmitted to the users within the enterprise and the recipients outside Office 365.

Much easier if the subscribers acquire an encrypted email from an Office 365 or Outlook account; no precautions are needed as it functions smoothly.

All the protection choices should indeed be digested a lot!! Office 365 experts can also support from beginning to end if you are grappling as to where to proceed and what to do.

Unlike other encryption service providers, focus on  SMART alternative, i.e., “Specific-Measurable- Assignable-Realistic and Time-related.”

It covers anything, establishing new encrypting messages, or the installation of own encryption functions for having flawless communication.

Sanjeev Pandey

EPC Group has led the way in IT support in Houston for more than 20 years. We design, deploy, deliver, and manage award-winning business-driven technology services and solutions changing the way people collaborate.