Due to the ever-increasing need for data security, and more stringent data protection policies (GDPR) - Encrypting sensitive or confidential data is a must.

While most of the popular email systems provide a paid add-on to provide encryption at rest, this can become costly, and doesn’t help protect data transferred by other mediums (eg. thumb drives).

No matter which method you use to encrypt your data, please remember that if you lose the encryption key (password), you will be unable to open the file. For this reason, we recommend only encrypting data that needs it, such as data leaving site. Data on a network share is generally protected access rules (ACLs) that limit who has access.

Using Microsoft Office

Microsoft office has built-in facility to password-protect a file, but this actually securely encrypts a the document using industry standard encryption.This is available in all recent versions of office, beginning with 2010, and encryption security has been increased as of 2013.

Usage

• Simply go to the Info tab and click Protect Document. Select Encrypt with Password.

Using 7-Zip

7-Zip is a free tool that allows you to compress & encrypt files and folders. While all modern versions of Windows allow you to compress a file to a .zip natively, they do not allow you to encrypt with a password.

PLEASE NOTE: This method requires your recipient to have 7-Zip too. If you wish to use this on all devices, please log a support ticket and we can deploy this for you.

Setup

• Download and install 7-Zip
• Once installed, select the file(s) or folder(s) and right click. Choose 7-Zip and then Add to archive...

Selecting multiple files

Or select a folder

• Configure the Encryption options: - Enter a secure password. - Optionally tick Encrypt file names

Once this has been encrypted, when you open it, you will see the file outlines but will not be able to extract or open the files without inputting the password.