E-mail plays a major role in business communications, offering the competitive advantages of increased speed and reduced costs. Messages can be sent, quickly and cheaply, across the Internet and across the world, to customers, colleagues, suppliers and trading partners. But many of these messages contain commercially or personally sensitive details. And that's the problem.

E-mail is highly vulnerable to hackers. Messages can be read or tampered with, impersonated or waylaid, without either the sender or designated recipient any the wiser.

Maintaining a second type of non-Internet e-mail system especially for confidential messages is neither economical nor user-friendly. A far more efficient and cost-effective solution is a Digital Certificate, which acts as an automatic electronic passport.

Benefits of Digital Certificates to securing e-mail :

• Reach - Lets you exploit the reach and low cost of e-mail for sensitive business communications and protects your company's knowledge assets;
• Non-repudiation - Enables electronic signatures to be added to messages giving proof of the senders identity. It creates a non-repudiable audit trail that is the basis of trust for e-business;
• Privacy - Encrypts messages and attachments to ensure bodytext can be read by intended recipients only.
• Integrity - Ensures messages have not been tampered with in transit, providing digital peace of mind.
• Speed - Increases speed of business processes and transactions, and reduces the costs of document distribution.

Managed PKI  provides a simple managed service supporting hundreds or thousands of digital certificates. And, for Microsoft Exchange users, the Secure Messaging for Microsoft Exchange solution makes implementation even quicker and easier.

Read our Free White Paper "Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) — selecting the right approach to securing e-mail, extranets, and intranets"