Games that have too many rules usually don’t stick with people, but the business game is an exception.
One could say that it has a pile of regulations and absolutely no mercy – and would be right.
Nowadays, we live in a polished world where you can no longer push the boundaries and get away with it. The system has its own rules and if you don’t respect them, the system will spit you out and crush your business like it didn’t even exist in the first place.
Nobody likes new laws, because we, as humans, are always striving for freedom. Having some limitations forced on us makes us uneasy, sure, but this doesn’t compare to the consequences we face when dismissing them.
Recently, a new set of regulations came to life. And they’ve come in like a wrecking ball!
Welcome the General Data Protection Regulation Because It Is Here to Stay
More often referred to as simply GDPR, this regulation of the European laws came into force on May 25, 2018.
The main idea of GDPR is to give “data subjects” control over the access to their personal information.
Data controllers are asked to improve their security measures in order to keep that information under a lock. Now, everyone who uses, stores, collects, and processes personal data of customers should adhere to the strict rules imposed by the GDPR.
Seems fair, as that data belongs to the people and not businesses. GDPR looks to protect human rights first and foremost, giving subjects the right to access and erase, and enabling them to understand what information about them is being gathered by the enterprises. Data portability was also introduced, so the subjects could obtain data in a standard form.
The regulation is fairly new, but it is already a hot topic of discussion within the worldwide corporate sector.
Of course, the changes didn’t sit well with most businesses. In all honesty, people had more than two years to prepare for the “paradigm shift,” so the reception should have been less negative.
Surely, there’s another elephant in the room that has to be mentioned.
Financial Woes from Getting and Not Getting a GDPR Compliant Email
Small businesses and startups usually don’t have the financial power to comply with GDPR, as 83% of US privacy professionals expect GDPR spending to be at least $100,000. Some of them even suggested that compliance would cost over $1,000,000, as the expenses rise depending on the size of the company.
And if you think that’s a lot of money, then you don’t know about the fines GDPR threatens for disobeying.
From repeat offenders, GDPR expects up to €20 million in fines or up to 4% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year.
If your “ship” got a leak or a data breach and you didn’t take any precautionary measures to stop it – you’re in BIG trouble. GDPR will take everything you have and everything you don’t have yet.
And you know what makes it even worse? Third-party services (that includes your email provider) used by your organization must also be compliant, even if they theoretically don’t fall under GDPR’s umbrella.
You Are Remembered for The Rules You Break
Hot on his heels, an Austrian data privacy campaigner, Max Schrems, blasted Facebook and its subsidiaries in WhatsApp and Instagram with GDPR violation cases on the first day of it coming into effect. Those complaints totaled in €3.9 billion for the online giants!
Credit where credit is due, the man didn’t waste any time to confront the “cream of the crop”.
Schrems pointed out that Facebook didn’t give people a viable choice when asking them to decide whether to share or not to share their information with the social network, thus violating their rights.
Mark Zuckerberg surely didn’t appreciate that lawsuit, and nor will you when GDPR complaints will flood your company.
Why are we talking about your company all of a sudden? Because it sends and receives tons of personal credentials in regular emails that violate a bunch of GDPR postulates.
So how does one become GDPR compliant? How can you get a GDPR compliant email, and is it really so hard and expensive as people think?
Well, one of the main messages sent by GDPR is a need of data encryption that decodes the original content of your letter and leaves peeking outsiders dumbfounded as a result. GDPR wants the sensitive data to stay secure, and regular emails are everything BUT secure.
The main nemesis of GDPR (and this is your enemy too) is undoubtedly the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) that moves your sensitive emails around the web in plain text format.
Exposure to email relays and 3rd party servers makes your data breach-prone through man-in-the-middle attacks, BEC and EAC scams that are based on simple phishing techniques.
A Perfect GDPR Enterprise Email Security Solution
The solution to these problems would be an email encryption service that would save the personal information of your clients in a protected place, so a data breach would become impossible.
A Stealth Channel that would be seamless in integration. In fact, there is no IT-integration needed.
The perfect solution must be GDPR compliant and easy to use… Not possible, you say?
But that email security solution already exists and it is developed by a team with a military background that is dedicated to making corporate emails GDPR compliant and secure for business communications.
StealthMail developed a Secure Dynamic Network and Protocol (SDNP) to solve the persistent issues brought by SMTP.
With StealthMail you are not risking to lose your information to hackers, as the data itself is never exposed to the Public Internet.
Much like GDPR, StealthMail believes that you should have control over the information that belongs to you, and gives you exclusive oversight over your encryption keys, data, and access rights.
You should no longer hold your breath, hoping that a third party that used to store the data for you will see the content of your emails.
Data is stored in encrypted form on your own side and only verified people can get access to it. A two-way authentication and the usage of digital signatures serve as a “border pass,” filtering out the dangerous imposters from pretending to be your associates.
End-to-end encryption and a protected Azure Cloud inside your own company will keep the confidential data secure and backed up. StealthMail doesn’t need to be integrated into your existing IT infrastructure, as it is often used as an Outlook add-in, but is also available as a mobile and desktop app.
To find out more information about email encryption and other solution features, please go to StealthMail.com today.
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