The Los Angeles, California-based company is offering two complementary flavours to its encryption service.
One, a gateway service in which everything leaving a customer’s network for a given destination will be encrypted based on a pre-set policy, though there is no actual gateway device present on the customer’s premises, and another, a desktop plug-in, in which an individual employee downloads a thin client that integrates with Outlook or Notes to enable encryption of emails on a case-by-case basis.
This is of particular importance for internal email, said Alan Akahoshi, product manager of FrontBridge’s secure email offering.
A number of FrontBridge’s competitors, such as MessageLabs and BlackSpider, have already launched encryption as a paid-for add-on to their filtering services, but they have generally been based on TLS, which essentially means creating an encrypted pipe out of the customer’s site to their data centers and on into the recipient’s mailbox. The FrontBridge offer, on the other hand, uses Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) technology from Palo Alto, California-based Voltage Security Inc to differentiate itself.
We’ve done TLS pipes to our data center for outbound mail as a free part of our service for some time, but now with IBE we’re offering customers the ability not just to send clear text through an encrypted pipe, but actually to encrypt the text itself, and in a granular manner, said Akahoshi.
He also sought to distinguish between what FrontBridge is offering and services from the likes of Zix Corp, which offers email encryption (but no filtering) in a different manner. It holds the encrypted email and alerts the recipient to the fact that they have mail, directing them to its website to authenticate themselves and then download, whereas FrontBridge delivers the encrypted mail into the recipient’s mailbox, then has them authenticate on its website, after which they can view it in clear text.
The FrontBridge service, called FrontBridge Secure Email, will be charged on a per-seat basis with a tiered model of volume discounts. At the entry level, it will cost around $5 per seat for companies with around 1,000 user.
