Virtru Academy Live: Virtru O365 for End Users

Steven Margulies: Today, we will be going over Virtru for Microsoft 365 essential user training. A quick look at today's agenda: We will cover what Virtru is and why it is important. We will go through how to use the add-in, which will be the bulk of today's session. Then, we will cover topics such as how to get support, and we will go over any questions you all might have that we can answer.

My name is Steven Margulies. I am the Senior Director of Customer Support, and I am going to dive right in.

So, what is Virtru, and why is it important? Virtru is an email and file encryption solution that gives users full control over their sensitive data. It plays a key role in helping customers keep their data secure and stay compliant with major regulations such as HIPAA, FERPA, CJIS, and many more.

What Virtru does is encrypt your sensitive content, emails, or files, which helps with these compliance regulations. If you fail to adhere to these, you might face large fines. It also helps limit the risk of a data breach. It is an additional level of security that gives you control over your data and ensures only authorized recipients have access. With these tools, you can help maintain trust. If there were some sort of breach or compliance violation, that can undermine your trust with your customers. The economic and reputation fallouts of breaches can cost upwards of millions of dollars.

When should you use Virtru? This is not necessarily going to cover every single use case your organization may have. I just want to call out that for general guidelines or guidelines for your team, speak to your internal administrators about when they expect you to use Virtru. However, these are some common scenarios in which we see organizations using our product.

We have health and services, covering anything with HIPAA, health reports, communication with clinics, police, and fire. This includes case reports or criminal justice information, which can stretch down to courts. This applies to any legal communications, security data, et cetera. When dealing with children and families, personal or financial data, identifiable information, or personal health information, you should use encryption. Regarding Social Security, anything with the IRS or Social Security Administration, such as your Social Security number, are things you want to protect. If you are in HR, maybe it is onboarding paperwork, benefits, compensation information, or anything private. This is not an all-encompassing list; these are just some common scenarios where we see our customers using Virtru.

Now, let’s jump into how to use Virtru. This presentation will focus on the end-user experience. The demo I am going to go through soon will cover installation from an end-user perspective, activation, sending secure messages, applying additional security settings, reading secure messages, secure search, as well as the recipient experience, and some additional tips and tricks that might help you as a Virtru Office 365 user.

The first place you want to start will be our help center. If you are an end user and you are installing Virtru on your own, you can go to the Virtu for Users section. There is a "Virtru for Outlook 365 Add-in" section. Then we have "Get Started," and we have the install guide: "Install and Activate the Virtru for Outlook 365 Add-in." Note that this is a different product than our desktop extension. This is the newer product and also the direction that Microsoft is moving.

I also want to note that for some organizations, administrators may deploy the add-in on their own. If you are an end user, you might not need to do this step. But if your admin has asked that you install this on your own, I am going to walk through it now.

The first thing you want to do is open this link in your browser. It should look something like this. You are going to right-click in the body, select "Save As," and then save that file. Once you have that file saved, you are going to use one of these two links. It is going to open your Outlook Web Mail or OWA, but it is going to open it in a specific state with the add-in menu open. It is very important that you use one of these two links as you want to make sure you land in this specific menu. You will go to "My Add-ins." At the bottom, there is a section for "Custom." You do "Add Custom," then "Add from File," and you will select that XML file that we saved previously.

Now you can see Virtru is listed as an add-in. It might take a moment for it to appear here. I am just going to refresh my page to see if that gets it to appear quicker. Let the page finish loading, and you can already see it here. It is not clickable yet; you won't be able to click Virtru until you are drafting a message or reading an email. So let’s hit "New," and you can see Virtru is now highlighted here and clickable. If you don't see Virtru here, you might need to click on this "Apps" option where you might also see Virtru listed.

The first thing you will have to do once you get Virtru installed is go through an activation process. You can activate with your login credentials from Microsoft or with an email. I am going to use the credential method here. Put in your username and password—mine is autofilled. Let it run through the process; it is usually pretty quick, and you can see it has already begun loading.

Now that you have Virtru here and activated, you have the option to enable it on a message. If you don't see Virtru once you activate it when you open a new email, you can always go and find it in this Apps menu. Or, as a tip, if you are going to be using Virtru frequently, we do have a pin option so that it opens whenever you open a new email.

If you want to secure a message, you want to toggle this on. You can put in your recipient, your subject, and we can add a file and maybe some text here. If you want, you can also add some additional security options to your message. You can disable forwarding so that whoever receives that message, if they try to send the email to a new party, the new party won't have access even if they get the raw email in their inbox.

You could set an expiration date for content. I will do an example here. I am going to set it to one month so that after one month, the recipient loses access. You could also apply some additional settings on your attachments, such as watermarking, which can disable downloading and put the recipient's email address on the face of the document when they go to view it. Or, you can use persistent protection, which also disables local file downloading, although it allows the user to download an HTML file that is essentially a direct link to viewing that file in the Virtru Secure Reader, which we will look at in a few moments.

Here, I have my message. It is ready to go. I am going to hit send. You will see "Virtru is working on your request." You will always see this message as long as Virtru is installed. Whenever you are sending an email, the first thing occurring when you hit send is Virtru checking to see if you have asked us to do anything. If Virtru is not on, we might run some quick rule scanning. We will look at that in a moment. Once we are finished processing, the email will go out. If you have toggled it on, it will go out securely. Or, if a rule has triggered, it might also auto-encrypt.

I am going to quickly show you what a rule might look like if it auto-encrypts. Here is another email. I am going to put a fake Social Security number in. In this particular organization, there is a rule that looks for this pattern. When I hit send, you can see again, Virtru is working, but it is going to grab this email, and you can see it wrapped it up. We are going to look at the Sent folder in a moment.

We also have scenarios where you might get a warning. I am going to hit send, and this time, there is a warning that the administrator set up that said, "Hey, if this keyword or key phrase is in the email, you may want to consider encryption," and you can then make the decision.

Finally, there may be a scenario where you go to send something and the email or the content is outright blocked. Again, these are set by your administrator. If you have any questions about rules, you would want to speak with them. Or, if you want a custom rule for a common scenario, they can also help set that up for you.

The next thing I want to cover is how to read your secure emails. If you go to your Sent folder, or if you had one sent back to you, when you click on Virtru or an email that is Virtru encrypted, it is not going to automatically encrypt inline. Because you have Virtru installed, you do not need to click "Unlock Message." This is very important. You can go this way, but it is going to go through a whole activation flow. What you would want to do is find Virtru. It might be here, or it might be in the Apps menu. Open Virtru, and then you can actually see the content right here. I know this is a little small. You can expand this window; however, you can pop this out. If you do have a longer message than one line, you can pop it out and have a much larger view for reading your content.

Again, if you are reading Virtru, you need to open the add-in to decrypt the content. If you are frequently going to be sending secure content, you can pin this so that Virtru automatically opens whenever you open an email. If you were to go to a message that did not have encryption, it is simply going to say the message is not encrypted.

To go back here, another thing I want to show you: If this is a message that you sent, then you can actually modify the security settings. Maybe the expiration date needs to be changed. Maybe you want to change the disabled forwarding. Whatever it is, you as the sender have control over those settings, and you can adjust them.

We also have a secure search functionality. Let's look for the word "please." What you are going to do is verify the search term. It is actually going to automatically add something to your clipboard. So when you go up here, it is going to give you a word in plain text as well as some unique search tokens. Now, these search tokens are unique per organization if this feature has been enabled. You will only be able to search content sent by you and your teammates and not content sent by other parties. For instance, I can search things that my organization sends. But if my dentist is using Virtru and they send me an email, I can't search the body of those emails. However, you can always search things like the subject, the sender, et cetera—the content that is in plain text. If you use this search, you can see my message shows up even though "please" is not here; it is within this message.

What does the recipient experience look like? Let's jump over here. You can see these are the emails I sent. If I am a recipient, I am going to see that same template that you see within the body of the message. If they don't use Virtru, which many of your recipients might not be, they will click "Unlock Message." That will take them to the Virtru Secure Reader where they can select or enter their email address. If they are using Google or Microsoft, they do have the option to sign in with their provider. If they are on an unsupported mail provider, they will use a one-time verification link. I am just going to show that process for this demo.

They will come back here. They will get a Virtru verification email in the same browser. They want to make sure they click "Verify Me," and then they can see that message. You can see things like "Expires in a month" and the watermarking settings that were applied for this particular attachment. Because it is watermarked, I can't download it, but I can view it. You can see all across the face of the document, the email address of the viewer is shown so that if they were doing a screenshot, you would know who did that.

Within this portal, they can actually send something back to you. Maybe they want to add files. Whatever that is, they add their content. They have security settings and attachments as options. If they hit "Secure Send," they will actually get a copy in their Secure Reply. It is set as a reply to, and you as the original sender will get a copy in your inbox. Again, since you are reading the email, you want to decrypt it in the add-in over here.

Another thing I want to show before we jump back to the slides is we do have this add-in menu which can be used for troubleshooting. We have options for printing and refreshing your user settings. Maybe your administrator has some new rules they put in place and you want to pull those in immediately; this is the quickest way to do that. If you want to clear your activation and restart, you can clear the cache. We also have some advanced logging that we might ask you to enable if we are helping you troubleshoot something. We have links to the support center and the Virtru Control Center, where you can see a high-level overview of the content you have sent, such as subject lines, and manage the security settings for your content similar to how we did here. End users and admins both have a Control Center, although the admins have many more functions available to them.

How do you get support? There are two main support options, both through the support center. The first one is self-serve. You all saw the start of this demo in the support center because I wanted to get to the install guide. That is at support.virtru.com. We have tons of content in the support center aimed at end users as well as recipients. We have how-to guides, troubleshooting guides, and informational overviews. There is a lot of content to help you self-serve and get to a resolution as quickly as possible.

However, we know that things are not always going to be available in the help center. It may not cover your use case, so we do offer the ability to contact support. At the top of that page, you will be sent to a support form, and we ask that you just provide as many details as possible. This will then open a ticket with my team, and we can help you find a resolution.

That is the end of the presentation, and we can open the floor to any questions you all might have. I am happy to re-show any part of the demo if you want more clarity on the process.

So, the first question: "Why are there some people who are unable to open our documents when they are protected by Virtru?"

Recipient issues can occur for a variety of reasons. Most commonly, we find that there might just be a workflow issue. Maybe they are using a different email address than the content was sent to, or they might have some sort of firewall in place that might be blocking a URL that we require. On our help center, we do have a couple of steps based on the error they are encountering. We have various guides as well as instructions for which URLs their administrators might need to allow to ensure access.

Next question: "How about mobile Outlook?"

That is a great question. The nice thing about this add-in is the installation is user-specific. So, it is going to follow you around through your different Outlook products. If you install it here, it is going to appear in the Outlook Windows application. It will appear in Outlook for Mac. It will even be available on your mobile device. However, on your mobile device, we only offer the ability to decrypt content. You can't securely send from Outlook for iOS or Outlook for Android, but the add-in itself will be available for decryption on those platforms.

A new question came in: "From the compliance point of view, can the attachments that have been sent be viewed?"

The sender of the content and their administrators always have access to the content. I sent the email earlier with my attachment. Even if I revoke access here, which affects the recipient, I still have access to that content, and I can view it. If you are an administrator, you also have access to both manage the settings as well as to decrypt the content.

We have other advanced tools as well if you are trying to bulk decrypt messages and their attachments. Those are separate tools that require different configuration, but those are also available. Again, you as the sender or the administrator of a sender will always have access to your sent content.

I will quickly go to the Control Center. I am not going to go too deep on rules because that can be pretty complex, but I can show that as well as an overview of the content that has gone out. If you are an administrator or end user, again, you have access to the Control Center. You will have to log in. End users, if they are non-administrators, will only have "My Data" and "Settings." Administrators have additional tabs. So if you are an administrator and you want to set rules, we do have the Rules tab where you can do some basic text patterns. We have some prebuilt patterns and keywords you can add, or you can go to the custom rule builder. Your end users will not have access to this.

From the end user and admin perspective, there is "Org Data" and the personal section, "My Data." My Data is going to be specific to just one user. In the admin view, if you go to Org Data, it will show content for all of your users. You can see here the subject lines of the messages I sent out. You can also see a file section. Now, the content is not stored in the Control Center, so you cannot view the emails or your email attachments here. You just see the metadata. If I go to that message, you can see the recipient. You can see the security settings. You can manage those security settings. I can reauthorize—this is the one I revoked when I was in OWA directly. If an email were to be auto-encrypted, such as this one, the validation report will actually note which email rule would have wrapped that message.

Next question: "How does this affect journaling for admins that may have to locate an email?"

If you are looking for an email, you can always search by the sender, the recipient, or the subject line. Those are always going to be searchable. Now, if you are in something like Purview or your archive and you are trying to find a message by keyword, you could utilize the same method here where you can grab the search string from here and then use that in your other systems. It should work the same. I used "please" earlier, and this adds it. You can actually use the same string in another system to locate those emails.

Now, in your other programs or in your archive, you won't be able to directly decrypt the content in that platform. If you are an admin, you should be able to unlock that message and view it in a secure reader. Or, if you wanted to go to the next step and configure our Data Protection Toolkit—that is a separate product that requires advanced configuration—we do have that ability. Essentially, you would export a PST or inbox of emails that you wish to decrypt. You run them through this Data Protection Toolkit, and it can then output the corresponding decrypted copies of those messages and any attachments. If there is something that was already decrypted, it will just output it all the same.

But regarding your archive, you won't necessarily be able to search the body of the email by just using the keyword. You will need to find the search terms that are unique for your organization for each keyword you are looking for. Again, if you want to search the body, by grabbing the search phrase from here, you should be able to insert that. There might be some syntax differences. This is a Boolean syntax. I don't know if your archive might use the same syntax or if you need to adjust it, but you would essentially want to make sure you are looking for this in plain text—in case it is not encrypted—and then the presence of all three of these. You might need to make it something like "AND," "AND," to make sure that all three of these search tokens are accounted for. That would depend on how your system requires the syntax to be formatted.

I appreciate everyone joining. Again, we will have additional sessions in the coming months, such as a session for Secure Share if you also purchased that product, as well as additional user trainings on the 365 add-in. So you could definitely send end users to this training if they are new or they missed this. These recordings also go live on our website. I believe you will get an email at the end of this with a link to that as well. Thank you again. Hope you all have a great day.