The recent two week period that left an email server’s sensitive but unclassified contents exposed to anyone on the internet with the server’s IP address has raised debate about whether this was a result of a misconfiguration or a hack, attack, or breach. But this is missing the point: email is an antiquated protocol that was not designed to protect highly sensitive information, and security tools, appliances, and configurations are often bolted on after the fact.

Segregating sensitive email servers to distinct networks like Microsoft’s Azure government cloud for Department of Defense customers, or erecting additional permissions-based Zero-Trust architectures, do not fully address the challenge. The data remains more vulnerable to insider and 3rd-party attacks than necessary.

Time To Adopt End-to-End Encryption

It’s time to adopt protocols built from the ground up with end-to-end encryption to protect collaboration and communications, including messaging and file sharing. Done right, such a protocol would not only enable secure communications, but also end-to-end encrypted retention & review capabilities capable of supporting the compartmentalization needs of organizations like USSOCOM.

ArmorText has built exactly this type of next generation protocol from the ground up. ArmorText employs a user+device and scope-of-review specific end-to-end encryption approach that has numerous benefits.

• As a service provider, ArmorText hosts a solution that ensures its employees, partners, suppliers, and vendors have zero access to its clients’ communications since they were never end-to-end encrypted for them.
• Client admins are able to administer an ArmorText environment without themselves ever being end-to-end encrypted for.
• End-to-end encrypting for distinct scopes of review provides more granular compartmentalization of communications than permissions below, but now backed by end-to-end encryption.

ArmorText’s more granular user+device specific end-to-end encryption provides multiple end-user benefits that go well beyond security, i.e. end-to-end encryption that improves user experiences rather than degrading them.

We need to prioritize protocols built from the ground up with end-to-end encryption to protect collaboration and communications. It’s time to make the switch.