First Encrypted Desktop-to-Desktop Messaging Service

August 30, 2004

FrontBridge Technologies, the enterprise market leader for message management and email security, today launched the first managed service for desktop-to-desktop encrypted email. FrontBridge selected Voltage Security Inc., a leading provider of secure business communication solutions, as its strategic technology partner. FrontBridge Secure Email has been successfully tested by more than fifteen organizations, representing the healthcare, financial, and legal verticals where compliance regulations, from the Gramm Leach Bliley Act (GLBA) to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), are driving secure email adoption in increasingly large volumes.

As a completely managed service, FrontBridge is able to implement an encrypted email solution rapidly, without the typical implementation challenges or up front capital investment required from an organization. Implementation is reduced from weeks or months to a matter of hours, ensuring that companies with immediate compliance needs can quickly and affordably start using an email encryption technology for securing confidential client communications.
Rosemary Hoge, IT security administrator, at Bristol Hospital, a full service healthcare institution serving the greater Bristol, Conn. area has conducted early tests of FrontBridge Secure Email. “Regulations such as HIPAA demand that patient records be handled with the utmost confidentiality,” said Hoge. “FrontBridge Secure Email ensures patient record privacy. It's an easy-to-use system that can be deployed rapidly into a hospital environment.”
The FrontBridge Secure Email service is the first managed service to leverage Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) technology from Voltage Security. IBE is a breakthrough in cryptography that removes the hurdles associated with the complicated Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). Instead of relying on traditional PKI, FrontBridge Secure Email enables users to simply use the recipient’s email address to securely send and receive business communications.

Michael D. Osterman, president of Osterman Research (Black Diamond, Wash.), a leading messaging industry market analysis firm, commented, “FrontBridge Secure Email offers several distinct advantages for financial and healthcare companies grappling with complicated compliance requirements. The managed service is easy to implement, requiring no complicated infrastructure build out, and more importantly, it’s easy to use, ensuring that the service can be counted upon to protect critical information assets. FrontBridge is on the move, providing a broad portfolio of services to tackle multiple aspects of message management.”

Managed Service Enables Rapid Implementation of Email Encryption FrontBridge will market and sell its secure email service as part of its suite of message management tools that include managed services for spam filtering, virus protection, message archiving, content policy enforcement and disaster recovery. The service allows enterprises bound by government regulations and corporate messaging policies to send confidential material via their standard desktop business email program.
“Encrypted desktop-to-desktop communication has not taken off because existing methods have proven cumbersome to use and very difficult to deploy and manage,” said Steve Jillings, president and CEO of FrontBridge Technologies. “Yet, government and corporate regulations require that privileged communications are encrypted. We’re taking secure email to the mainstream by making the encryption and decryption of messages as simple as clicking a button in a standard email client without complicated passwords or PKI. After surveying the market, we selected Voltage as the most appropriate solution for our requirements.”

“We are seeing increasing demand for managed service offerings in the market,” said Sathvik Krishnamurthy, president and CEO of Voltage. “Our partnership with FrontBridge enables enterprises to add a secure messaging service in a completely managed environment. Network administrators don’t have to manage and maintain an additional system and get the added benefit of automatic network redundancy and failover with FrontBridge Secure Email.” FrontBridge Secure Email bolsters existing encryption techniques that ensure messages are not tampered with during transit, including network-wide support for Transport Layer Security (TLS). FrontBridge Secure Email is available immediately and will leverage the benefits of the company’s renowned SMART Network, a globally distributed, fully load-balanced data center network that is Secure, Managed, Active, Resilient and Trusted. The SMART Network is the only managed service to deliver 100-percent historical uptime and one of the few managed service networks to guarantee 99.999-percent reliability.

Resellers Excited About Opportunities for FrontBridge Secure Email Michael Breamer, a national account manager for Anitian Enterprise Security, a leading enterprise technology integrator, commented on the benefits FrontBridge Secure Email provides for his enterprise customers.
“Anitian specializes in deploying enterprise-level technologies for some of the nation’s largest
corporations, and for these audiences, keeping pace with the latest regulatory requirements is a
foremost concern,” said Breamer. “FrontBridge Secure Email finally makes desktop-to-desktop
encryption accessible for even non-technical audiences. We anticipate strong demand for this
service and look forward to offering its benefits to our customers.”

The FrontBridge Secure Email Service
FrontBridge Secure Email is delivered as a completely managed service. It removes the hurdles associated with maintaining an in-house server and enables the following unique benefits:
• Secure anytime, anywhere communication. Users can encrypt and decrypt communication and information, online and offline, and anywhere in the world with transparent roaming and full support of mobile messaging devices such as Blackberry.
• Self-provisioning. No pre-enrollment of recipients is needed to send secure ad hoc communication
• Ease-of-use. Seamless integration with leading client applications enables users to transparently send and receive secure communication without changing their day-to-day behavior
• Ease-of-administration. FrontBridge Secure Email can be quickly implemented and centrally administered. No complicated archive solutions are required for keys or messages to ensure business continuity
• Low total cost of ownership (TCO). FrontBridge Secure Email eliminates complex infrastructure, thus reducing overall costs

Source: FrontBridge