How to Encrypt Your Emails (No Matter Who Your Provider Is) [Infographic]

Security breaches have become all too common in the recent years, with an average breach costing companies $3.86 million. Taking preventative measures to secure your company’s email is a necessary step in thwarting these costly attacks.

The public key infrastructure (PKI) is used when encrypting and decrypting an email. A person is assigned a public key that can be accessed by anyone and a private key that can only be found on the person’s computer. The public key is used to encode an email sent to the person and the person then decodes the message with their private key.

Both S/MIME and PGP/MIME or Open PGP are used as email encryption protocol. Which one you choose to use will depend on which email provider you have. While popular providers such as Gmail and Outlook have S/MIME capabilities built in, others such as Yahoo or AOL will need an app to implement PGP/MIME.

To help you further understand the breakdown of how email encryption works, Panda Security has an infographic that explains what it is and which secure apps can help you encrypt your email, no matter what provider you use.