Provide an appropriate way for clients to send documents to you

In 2020 it's hard to live a life without the use of email and the internet, with the world's largest businesses and governments migrating to the online world. With this, many organisations will use email as their principle communication tool for data sharing and to request personal information from clients.

The way email works is through a mail 'client' (the program or webmail you commonly use) sending a message to an email 'provider' and from here the message may run through a range of other providers before arriving at the recipient's mail client. Before reaching the recipient, the original email may pass through a variety of unencrypted, unknown and potentially an untrusted sequence of transmissions and temporary storage. At each of these points the content of an email containing personal information could lead to a breach of personal data which may result in identity theft or fraud.

Until recently, most email transmissions were completely unencrypted but many email clients now use TLS (Transport Layer Security) to encrypt the transaction between the client and the mail provider. Whilst this provides a level of privacy and security to the first step in an email's path to a recipient, the email's contents will still be at risk when temporarily stored unencrypted at each mail provider. It may also pass over unencrypted channels between providers. A sender therefore has very little control over what happens to the mail content once it is released from their side.

Businesses need to comply with regulations such as the GDPR and the UK's Data Protection Act 2018. These require 'appropriate technical security measures' to be employed to protect personal data and requesting customers' information by email certainly doesn't seem appropriate. How can businesses implement stronger security measures and enable individuals to feel safer and more comfortable when sending personal data?

One solution is for businesses to provide a file upload facility through their secure websites, running over TLS. However, many companies use third party providers to host their sites so the provision of such facilities may not be feasible or, even if they could do so, the result would be data residing (unencrypted) with the web host rather than the intended recipient company.

A secure file transfer service provides a way for businesses to receive data from their customers through a third party provider but where the data is safely encrypted throughout the whole process. A notable example is SureSend. The way this works is through files being securely transferred to the SureSend service where they're encrypted whilst in temporary storage so that only the recipient business can access them. The recipient business can then securely download the files to their own internal systems. This system means that no data is shared amongst other parties due to the encryption and the sender can feel content knowing that their personal information is not being put at risk.

Dapris, Orega, 76 King Street, Manchester, M2 4NH

SureSend lets you securely exchange documents containing sensitive personal and financial information.
How SureSend works:

Request a file upload from one of your clients
Your client uploads their file to SureSend using a secure connection
Files are encrypted within SureSend using keys that are unique to your account
Only the account holder can decrypt and securely download the files
The simplicity of SureSend is that your clients do not need to register with the service in order to upload files to you.
Sending files to your clients works in a similar way and you can request an optional authentication step to verify the identity of recipients.

Benefits

Compliant with data protection legislation
Simple
Cloud application
No installation required

This release was published on openPR.