Retarus secures vital communications through COVID-19

Earlier this month, we caught up with enterprise-level cloud provider, Retarus, a firm working to secure and streamline business communications. One of Retarus’ flagship offerings is a platform dedicated to supporting secure email communications.

In the modern enterprise, email is an indispensable communication channel – but given the prevalence of its use, and the sheer volume of email communications, there are clear security challenges that businesses are keen to overcome. For those in highly regulated industries, unsecured email communications present compliance concerns. For others, secure email platforms offer an opportunity to take control of entire business workflows and build greater transparency – a particularly attractive goal for many given the increasingly decentralised and remote operations adopted in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Outside of security, email communication channels present other challenges to the enterprise – as IT estates evolve over time, the consistency across systems and tools that use email shifts too, creating logistical challenges that must be overcome. Further, as each system and business works to secure their specific environments, the stringency of filters that exclude or quarantine potentially essential emails and information become harder for legitimate enterprises to navigate.

This is where Retarus’ secure email platform works its magic – and we can find a particularly relevant example where the firm worked with government and healthcare authorities in Germany to coordinate their vaccine programme through Retarus’ Transactional Email capability. A move that would see the solution at the centre of a huge number of automated messages throughout the country, alerting patients with key information around their vaccination, such as appointment details. According to Retarus, ‘A service that is qualified for this critical task must be able to handle peak loads with very high transmission volumes, while also ensuring that the emails are always reliably placed in their recipients’ inboxes. It is essential, for instance, that these critical messages do not get stranded in spam filters along the way – a hurdle that should not be underestimated for the high-volume, automated transmission of email straight from business applications.’

This example demonstrates both Retarus’ capabilities and the criticality of email as a digital communication channel underpinning large sections of the modern world. Other examples include Continental deploying the solution to provide more reliable communications to customers and suppliers and a raft of firms using the extra layers of security and traceability to meet industry compliance standards.

To date, Retarus works with approximately one-quarter of the S&P 500, with a strong track record of client engagements spread across the firm’s 28-year history. Indeed, some of the firms’ oldest clients have been working with Retarus for well over two decades.

We’ll likely see much more emphasis on securing core business communications over the following years – Retarus noted a significant increase in the firm’s solutions through the COVID-19 pandemic as employees moved to home offices and email become the de facto communication channel for most business activities. A fact which fuelled a significant increase in Phishing as malevolent entities and individuals worked to exploit weaknesses in the rapid shift in business operations.