NHSMail shortlisted for major industry awards: An interview with Egress

Egress CEO Tony Pepper discusses the NHSmail project, and how Coronavirus has affected his organisation, and the industry more broadly

Secure messaging provider Egress has been shortlisted in the UK IT Industry Awards for its NHSmail project, and for its partnership with charity Victim Support. Computing caught up with Egress CEO Tony Pepper.

Computing: How has the pandemic affected your business?

Tony Pepper: No organisation has been left unaffected by the pandemic. As the "new normal" has become just "normal", our work and home lives have been shaped accordingly. For the Egress team, it's impacted us on two levels - how we operate and how our customers operate.

Like many companies, we've instituted remote working across our global offices in line with government guidance. We were fortunate at the start of the pandemic that our business continuity plan was able to kick in immediately - for example, all our employees have laptops and VPN connections, so it was a straightforward process. It's also given us the chance to do things differently - we've really challenged ourselves on making sure our internal communications are as robust as possible and we're finding ways for our teams to connect with each other socially, albeit remotely!

The other, inevitable, impact is how it has affected our customers. Across the board, the shift to remote working has accelerated digital transformation and meant that businesses have been forced to adapt. It's critical that new processes and ways of communicating internally, with the supply chain and with clients are secure - which has meant we're working very closely with new and existing customers to implement our technology to support secure email communication and file sharing, all while ensuring productivity and efficiency remain high!

The move to remote working and digital communication has also meant that some security threats have become more prevalent - for example, there's been a huge surge in the number of emails being sent each day, with our research showing 94% of organisations experiencing increased outbound email traffic, and one-in-two experiencing an increase of more than 50%. So the surface area for risk has increased and organisations are experiencing more security incidents increases in which data is exposed by, for example, attaching the wrong file to an email or sending it to the wrong person. We've been working with many organisations to ensure that they can adapt to these changes in how email is used in their business to ensure that their sensitive data remains secure.

CTG: Tell us about the Charity IT Project that was shortlisted?

TP: Victim Support is an independent charity that does vital work supporting people affected by crime and traumatic events in England and Wales. We're incredibly proud to have worked with them since 2014, and to have partnered with them on this project in particular. Like many organisations, much of their work is facilitated over email. Due to the nature of their work, VS's employees frequently need to share extremely sensitive information, which can have serious consequences for the data subjects if it's exposed to unauthorised access. So at a corporate level, VS is always looking for new ways to ensure this data is kept secure.

This project built on VS's existing use of email encryption to address other security use cases - particularly, misdirected emails - and saw VS adopt our Intelligent Email Security platform. Our technology utilises the latest in contextual machine learning to learn and understand users' behaviour and relationships to mitigate human error, such as selecting the wrong recipient from Outlook autocomplete, and ensure the right emails and attachments are sent to the right recipients with the right level of security applied.

CTG: Why is innovation important in the security space?

TP: Innovation is key for us as a business because our customers' needs are constantly evolving in line with changing security risks. The shift to remote working is a perfect example - employee behaviour

has changed drastically with remote working. For example, people are more distracted with family members or roommates interrupting them or they're working flexibly in the evenings to facilitate childcare, and organisations have had to ensure that their security strategies and the technologies they use can adapt to and are appropriate for this new landscape.

It's also important to innovate by utilising ground-breaking technology as it develops, such as AI and machine learning. Advances in machine learning have enabled us to ensure that our products can protect against factors like human error, which traditional solutions simply can't do. Not only is this good for security but these improvements mean we're able to deliver better use experiences. For us, we obsess about people relying on our technology, so if it was turned off, they'd demand to have it switched back on. We can only do that if we're delivering the best user experience - and machine learning helps us remove decision-making from the user where appropriate and provide a safety net that they need to do their jobs effectively and securely.

CTG: Tell us about the Healthcare Project?

TP: NHSmail is the UK's largest secure email system, available to and used by over 1.2 million healthcare professionals daily. Since March 2020, we've partnered with NHS Digital to provide the encryption technology within NHSmail, enhancing Microsoft 365 security and using network intelligence to create a frictionless recipient experience. We've also made large file transfer available directly within Outlook, helping healthcare professionals share medical data securely from the established NHSmail platform.

We will continue to work closely with NHS Digital to ensure we're providing the highest levels of security and assurance, and able to innovate to meet future requirements.

CTG: Egress is shortlisted and wins many awards, what's the secret of your success?

TP: I believe the secret to our success is that we put our customers at the heart of everything we do. Their needs come first, and that's how you end up creating solutions that go above and beyond in solving problems for organisations. We're constantly looking at how we can innovate and how we can meet, or even exceed, our customers' needs. This leads to wonderful use cases, such as our projects with Victim Support and NHS Digital, which we're incredibly proud of.