As an increasing number of companies move their communications and storage services to the cloud, data protection is becoming increasingly important. But the solutions are many, and finding the right one for your unique needs can seem intimidating.
If you find yourself in this situation, consider Proton for Business. This service provides secure email for the cloud with support for calendaring, file storage, and VPN—which enables organizations to achieve their compliance and security goals quickly and efficiently. This article discusses this platform in-depth.
What Is Proton?
Software company Proton was founded in Switzerland in 2014. The founders, a team of scientists acquainted with CERN, decided to make the then-utopian concept of digital freedom a reality. Proton’s mission was simple: protect users’ identity, prevent their data from being sold, and guard against cybercrime. And today, millions of users around the world are using Proton as their primary mailing provider.
Their servers are located in Switzerland, which means that users’ data is protected by Swiss law. One thing to note about Proton’s policy is that in the event of a violation, the company must disclose all user information to the Swiss authorities.
An Overview of Proton for Business
Proton for Business is a turnkey Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that provides companies with a set of end-to-end encrypted applications to ensure that data is protected. With this platform, businesses can meet compliance requirements related to personal data, financial information, and other sensitive data that needs to be secured.
It ensures security and efficiency, by offering cross-platform support with dedicated apps for mobile devices, Easy Switch migration, IMAP/SMTP support for standard email clients, priority customer support, and zero-access encryption as well as end-to-end encryption.
Zero-access encryption ensures that only the owner has access to the data, with a dedicated key. This means that private information cannot be read—not even by Proton itself. This technology, called Data At Rest Encryption (DARE), ensures that your data is not moving through networks.
End-to-end encryption means full encryption from start to finish. This ensures that no one can decrypt, access, or share any of your business’ data. Plus, Proton’s no-ads commitment guarantees that your data will never be shared with advertisers.
Proton’s Plans
Due to the fact that Proton doesn’t display ads and doesn’t sell users’ data to advertisers, their services can be quite expensive. Even though you can use some of Proton’s features for free, Proton for Business is definitely more costly than other secure email services. Depending on the plan you select, prices can go up to several hundred dollars per user, per year. There are three plans you can choose from, depending on your company’s needs: Mail Essentials, Business, and Enterprise. You can see a thorough comparison of the options here.
The Mail Essentials Plan costs $7.75 per user/month and is the basic option. It offers secure email with 15 GB of total storage space, 10 email addresses per user, support for 3 custom email domains, and basic VPN access to 100+ servers in 3 countries, on one device per user.
The Business Plan costs $12.61 per user/month. This plan offers secure email with 500 GB of total storage space, 15 email addresses per user, support for 10 custom email domains, and the highest-speed VPN access to 1700+ servers in 60+ countries, on 10 devices per user.
The Enterprise Plan’s pricing is customized according to your business requirements. From storage and email to VPN access, this plan offers a lot of flexibility.
Features
Proton provides a variety of tools to help you protect your company’s data. These include ProtonMail, Proton Calendar, Proton Drive, and Proton VPN. Let’s take a closer look at these features.
ProtonMail
According to a Symantec report, smaller organizations (up to 250 employees) have the highest rate of targeted malicious email—one in 323. In fact, 94% of malware is delivered by email. Strong firewalls and anti-spam protection are a good start, but they’re not enough to guarantee complete online safety. To ensure the highest levels of protection, ProtonMail’s open-source software has been thoroughly tested by security experts. It only uses secure implementations of AES, RSA, and OpenPGP. Moreover, all cryptographic libraries used are open-source. Of particular note is the advanced security layers that are integrated into ProtonMail—including PhishGuard, link protection, two-factor authentication, web key directory, and DNS Certification Authority Authorization.
Keeping productivity in mind, ProtonMail helps businesses by using features such as spam protection, filters, advanced search, and out-of-office message responses. Overall, this is a good selection of features. However, surprisingly, ProtonMail does not encrypt email subject lines. While the content of messages and any attachments remain securely encrypted, the address data and subject lines of emails are stored unencrypted. This can certainly be a downside for many users and business owners.
Proton Calendar
This feature offers the same security and privacy features as ProtonMail, using end-to-end encryption to protect your data. Proton cannot read the calendar events into an account, because a private key—which only the user has access to—is used to encode them.
Proton Drive
Proton Drive is a cloud storage solution that allows your business to use secure private cloud storage, with no file size limits. It is also fully encrypted, which means that not even Proton can access the files stored in the drive. Consequently, potential attackers cannot access any of your company’s data.
Proton VPN
Proton VPN guarantees secure Internet navigation and provides an additional layer of security for passwords, confidential data, and browsing activity.
Conclusion
Designed to provide optimal cloud security, Proton for Business could be a great resource for your company. The service offers a variety of tools and comprehensive encryption to protect your privacy, but certain information, such as email subject lines, is not encrypted. That being said, the control this platform provides still goes far beyond what you will find in most standard cloud solutions nowadays.
