E-mail, Safe and Sound
October 28, 1999
by Cameron Crotty
Faster than anybody could have possibly imagined, e-mail has become the nervous system of business. E-mail now handles meeting requests, brainstorms, memos, comments and the 1,001 documents that support the flow of organizations, large and small.
But for all that, e-mail is still a novelty act--it's cute, but you can't really count on it. The proof is in the numbers: Worldwide, physical delivery by fax, mail and courier costs companies $300 billion each year, according to market researcher Aberdeen Group.
That reliance on--and expense of--paper is about to change. You may have heard about secure e-mail or secure Internet delivery before, probably as part of a pricey proprietary network. But the age of secure, reliable delivery over the Internet is coming fast.
What's the Fuss?
Given the volume of e-mail that flies between businesses in a given day, some may wonder what the big deal is. Sure, someone might hack into your company network or mail server and grab your files, but an e-mail in transit is just bits and bytes, so it's pretty safe, right?
Open to the world. Internet experts generally agree that e-mail is even less private than a postcard and--just like an ordinary letter that you hand over to the U.S. Postal Service--virtually untrackable once it enters the delivery system. When an e-mail message leaves your company's mail server, it's handed around the Net like a baton in a relay race. It's not unusual for a piece of e-mail to pass through four or five mail servers before reaching its destination.
At each one of those stops, the opportunity for mischief or simple misadventure arises. E-mail can be hijacked, waylaid or just accidentally misdirected at any point along the journey. Not a problem if you're carrying on an average correspondence, but potentially catastrophic if a message carrying sensitive details goes astray.
This isn't news to tech-savvy companies. Consider ProNetLink, a global trade network. Members can search the network's database for companies that supply everything from portable radios to international shipping services. Members can also post requests for proposals and take bids from businesses around the world. Much of ProNetLink's business is transacted through the company's Web site, but members balked at using conventional e-mail to finalize deals, resorting instead to faxes and courier services.
"We had one Fortune 500 chemical company tell us outright that they would never send pricing or proposals out over a nonsecure e-mail system," recalls Glenn Zagoren, ProNetLink's chairman. "These guys aren't selling Beanie Babies on EBay. We had one company moving 50,000 tons of sulfur out of India a month. That kind of proposal you don't want just anybody to see."
Proof of delivery. For many companies, e-mail's Achilles' heel is not that a message might be read by someone other than the intended recipient, but that there's no way to prove whether and when a message reached its intended destination. "Security is about a lot of things," says Darcy Fowkes, research director of the Internet business practice at Aberdeen Group. "We don't look at overnight deliveries necessarily as secure, but we look at them as reliable. It's not that the information is so secret; it's that I need to have the ability to say to someone else that you got it."
Zagoren agrees, citing his customers' trust in established delivery services and lack of sympathy for excuses. "If UPS misplaces something, they'll be able to track it for you and come up with an answer," he says. "Telling someone that a document was 'lost in the mail' just doesn't fly anymore."
Making It Safe
In the summer of 1992, Mark Pastore was working at Sun Microsystems when two old college associates approached him with an idea for a way to deliver documents over the Internet. "The idea was about these next-generation faxes that would be sent over computer networks," recalls Pastore, "and once you started doing that, there were some cool possibilities."
After several years, many software prototypes and an extended side trip into universal document formatting (… la Adobe Systems' Portable Document Format), Pastore is vice president of corporate development for Tumbleweed Communications. Several companies--including United Parcel Service of America (UPS) and the U.S. Postal Service--are using Tumbleweed's Integrated Messaging Exchange software to provide secure delivery of documents over the Internet.
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