How do you share data with your business partners? Email attachments? Microsoft SharePoint sites? FTP? Purchased solution over leased lines? Many methods are available, but it's increasingly important to ensure that the method you use is a secure one. Regulations such as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) stipulate proper handling of customer data, and your company might have other types of sensitive data that it wants to protect when sending the information to a partner organization or a branch location.
The following articles present some options for secure file transfer:
Access Denied: Exchanging Files Securely, October 2005, describes how you can safely exchange files by using the encryption features in Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2003 or WinZip Computing's WinZip.
Secure File Exchange Over the Internet, February 2006, provides an overview of solutions for securing files for transport and then focuses on three encryption methods that work with email attachments: file compression utilities that also offer encryption, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). . . .