Virtru Academy Live: Secure Share for End Users

Ryan Speaker: Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining today. We're going to be going over Secure Share. Please feel free as we go through to drop questions in for Q&A, and we'll also have some time at the end. My name is Ryan Speaker. I'm the Senior Manager of Customer Support here, and I'm just going to go ahead and jump in today. 

Today, we're going to be going over what Virtru is and why it's important. We're going to be spending most of our time going over Virtru Secure Share, exploring the experience for requesting files from people, sharing files with people, and what the experience is like for the recipient getting those files. We'll also talk a little bit about how to get support and, again, hold a Q&A session at the end.

First, what is Virtru and why is it important? We are an email and file encryption solution that helps give you full control over your sensitive data. We play a key role in helping customers keep their data secure and stay compliant with major regulations such as HIPAA, FERPA, CJIS, and many more. Using Virtru to encrypt sensitive emails and files helps you stay compliant with a large number of regulations, and failure to adhere to those regulations can lead to large fines. It limits the risk of a data breach with another level of security that helps customers maintain control over their data, ensuring that only authorized recipients can access it.

Lastly, maintaining trust with your customers. Breaches and compliance violations undermine trust with your customers. The reputation and economic fallout of an average breach can cost millions of dollars, let alone the lost trust with your customers and your recipients. There are all kinds of places where Virtru can be really helpful. Health and other services can help protect Personally Identifiable Information and Personal Health Information to help maintain HIPAA compliance for things like health reports and communications with clinics. Police and fire departments can use it for case reports and investigations involving protected Criminal Justice Information and physical security data. It is also useful for sharing various pieces of sensitive information with the Social Security Administration and the IRS. Personally, I've used it for things like a mortgage application so that I'm not just sending my bank statements over regular email. I'm sharing them securely with the bank or the mortgage company. There are lots of good places to be using this, essentially anything that you would not want exposed and unencrypted for anybody to access.

Next, I'm going to jump into a live demo of how to use Secure Share. We're going to talk through logging in, sending files, requesting files from people, viewing files in the Secure Share history, and the recipient experience throughout all of this. I'm going to start off by going to the Secure Share page at secure.virtru.com/secure-share, and I'm going to go ahead and enter my email address.

Here at Virtru, we use a single sign-on, so it just took me right into it. If your organization doesn't do that, you'll be prompted to either sign in with an email provider like Gmail or Microsoft, or send an email verification to yourself. With signing in, you just put in your email credentials and it will take you in. If you choose to get a verification email, it will send you an email. You go to your inbox, and you'll have a link that you can click that will take you into Secure Share, or you'll get a code that you can put on the Secure Share login page.

Once you are signed in, you'll typically land on Secure Share. Depending on your organization, there may be workspaces up at the top, but most customers don't have that at this point, so you'll land directly on the Secure Share page. From here, where most of the work happens, we can go ahead and choose to upload files. I'm going to choose a file from my computer here. This is a PDF, but you can upload essentially any kind of file, including PDFs, Word documents, Excel files, or less common files with custom extensions. If you don't want to send 15 files to somebody, you can zip all of those up and just upload one zip file. That works too.

Once I've selected my file and uploaded it here, I can go ahead and click on the next screen. This will give me the different options I have when sharing. I can set an expiration date, so after this date and time passes, the recipient will no longer be able to access the secure file. Watermarking prevents downloads, and it also puts the recipient's email address all over the document. If they were to take screenshots or share it somehow, it would be really clear who it was that was sharing these files out. We also have Persistent File Protection. This prevents somebody from downloading the file to their computer. They do have a download option, but it basically saves a link back to Secure Reader. They never get a PDF or a Word document that lives on their local computer. They're always redirected back to Secure Share, and they can only view the file online.

Once I've selected my security options, I can then choose who I want to send it to. I can put in a subject. Lastly, I can include a message, hopefully something that encourages the person to know that it's you and that it's safe for them to open this file. This will come through as an unencrypted message, so when they get the email, this text will appear along with a link to Secure Share so they can see the file. If there was something especially sensitive in this message, you could choose to encrypt it, and they would not see this message until they had logged into Secure Share. 

Now I have uploaded my file, added my recipients, added a subject, and put in a custom message for the person. I will go ahead and share that file. As the sender, I will get a success message here. It tells me when I've sent it, shows me the different security options, who I sent it to, and what I said. I can also see down here at the bottom what it was I shared. If I wanted to at this point, I could go in and make changes. Maybe I also want to add Watermarking. I can do that, and it will update the settings for the file that was shared. If I realize that I shared this file but I misentered the email address or sent the wrong file to the wrong person, I can also revoke access. That doesn't take away the email that the recipient received, but when they go through the process to access the file, they will get a message that the file is no longer available to them.

Moving from the sharing experience to the recipient experience over here in the other window, you can see I've received a file that has the very secret cookie recipe. When I click into it, there's my unencrypted message right up at the top. As the recipient of this file, when I click the link, I'm taken to a Secure Reader. Here is our standard login process. I'm going to select my email address, and in this case, I'm going to send a verification email. Back in my inbox, I have my verification email. I can click the link or put in a code. Once I'm verified, I can see who sent the file and the different settings that are on it. I can see that it's going to expire on September 8th. Again, I see the subject and the message. From here, I can view the file. Since I watermarked it, I can't download it, but I can go ahead and view the file here by clicking on this. As a recipient, I can also choose to securely reply. So if you shared a file with me and I need to share a file back with you, we go through the same flow on the recipient side to share things back. That is sharing files as a Virtru customer.

Another feature in Secure Share is requesting files. Maybe you don't have anything to share in the first place, but you want to send a link so someone can securely share sensitive files back with you. We will choose "Request" up here at the top. Go ahead and enter the email address. We can put in our subject and our message, and then I can choose request. It successfully requested files from Ryan. 

When I go over to the recipient inbox, I have a new message. There's my unencrypted message at the top and my link to Secure Share. Since I already went through the authentication process and I have an active session with Virtru, it just takes me right in. However, if I did not, I would be required to go through that process of authenticating myself and getting the verification email. So as a recipient, now I'm in here, I can go to my computer and select my document. Again, recipients can share all kinds of file types, zip files, whatever it may be, back with you. Recipients also have the option of setting security settings for their files. Much in the same way you might not want your information getting out, a recipient may not want their information getting out. They can also set expiration dates, Watermarking, and Persistent File Protection that does not allow you to download the file so it is only viewable online. 

You'll notice this is a little bit different with the request. I cannot edit the recipients. It says speaker@virtru.com requested documents from me. speaker@virtru.com is the only person that I can send files back to with a request. Once that's done, it is very similar for recipients sharing files with you as it is for you as a Virtru customer sharing files with your customers. We get a confirmation screen with all of the details. We can see what was shared here. We can edit the share and the different settings for it, and if we made a mistake or don't want you to have access to it anymore, the recipient can revoke access to the file. So we see on both sides, whether you're sharing or requesting, both people maintain control over the data they are sharing with other folks.

We also have a history tab in Secure Share, so you can see all of the things that you have shared out. You can click into these and, just like that confirmation screen, see who we sent it to or received it from and what it was. From here, we can download the file, view the file, or reply to the file.

In addition to standard security rules, admins can request configurations for custom restrictions on content flowing in and out of their org. This does require custom branding. If your admin wants to restrict files, they can reach out to their Customer Success Manager at Virtru or our support team, and we can help get this set up. We can restrict different types of files if you never want to receive Excel files or PDFs. You can limit the number of files that are being shared per session, either outbound from you as a Virtru customer to recipients, or inbound by limiting how many files people can send back to you. You can also set file size limits. If you don't want 5-gigabyte files being shared with you or shared out from your organization, those can all be customized. We can also set Watermarking on or off, set specific expiration times for all shares, and turn on Persistent File Protection, which prevents people from downloading the actual document to their computer so they can only view it online. Within the security rules, there are different things that admins can set up. For example, if I go to add a file, your admins can set up different rules so that certain attachment types or certain recipients cannot be sent to. There are all kinds of different security rules your admins can set up to limit what is being shared and how it's being shared with recipients.

Next, you may have noticed there are some different choices for file sources and destinations. By default, everything is sourced from a local machine, and that's also where it saves. Somebody goes into their computer's file system, chooses a file to share out, and when they receive something back, it gets downloaded into their computer. That said, we do have options for other file sources. Google Drive is enabled by default, and admins can request that it be disabled so it's not a place people can pull files from. We also offer OneDrive and SharePoint as file sources, and all of these can also be set up as file destinations. So if your admins don't want to allow local downloads, we can disable that. We can also enable saving to Google Drive, OneDrive, or SharePoint by request from an admin.

In addition to being able to use Google Drive, OneDrive, and SharePoint as places to pull files from and save files to, we also have integrations that work directly within these products. Within Google Drive, you can have a Virtru app. You choose your file within Google Drive, click the Virtru Secure Share app, and that takes things right through the Secure Share process. It is a very similar experience for OneDrive and SharePoint. We also offer an integration with Zendesk. If your organization uses Zendesk as a help desk tool, this is a nice way to easily share and request files securely without having to leave Zendesk. Those files that are shared in or out are also available to other Zendesk users at your organization. This does require a little bit of configuration though, so your admins would need to work with customer support at Virtru to get this set up.

All right. That is how to use Secure Share, both sharing files out and requesting files from your customers, as well as the recipient experience for both of those. I think it is really important to understand what the person on the other side of the share or the request has to go through to get things back to you. For support at Virtru, we have a fantastic support center with tons of articles for helping both you as an end user and your recipients. We have how-to guides and troubleshooting guides, and all of that is at support.virtru.com. If you can't find an answer, our team is always here to help. From support.virtru.com in the top right corner, you can click "Contact Support" to open up a ticket, and you'll be connected with one of the fine customer support agents on my team. 

All right. I'm going to stop sharing, and we can answer any questions that have popped up in the chat. 

How can we send a file with Persistent File Protection in which the file can be edited? It seems almost the same as Watermarking without watermarks. Persistent File Protection does lock that file to be viewed only online, and Secure Share doesn't have any live collaboration tools or allow you to edit those documents. So there is not a way to edit a file and also have Persistent File Protection turned on. If there are other clarifications needed on that, I would encourage you to reach out to our support team, and we can work with you to see if there are any other options or different workflows that might help accommodate you.

Does Secure Share do CSV files? Yes. CSV, Excel, PowerPoint, PDFs, just about anything you can imagine. I've also seen some custom file types for 3D printing organizations. Just about anything will work. In those few situations where things don't really want to upload and are being unhappy, zipping those files up usually solves the problem, and you can just upload a zip file and send it out. So CSV files, 100 percent. And if something gives you an error or some kind of issue, a zip file is a great way to go.

Are there any file size limitations? We do limit files to 15 gigabytes. That is pretty large. That would be quite the Word document or something else. But it is 15 gigabytes per file, not per share. So you can have multiple 15-gigabyte files per Secure Share. Of course, that might take some time depending on your internet connection and everything, but our limits are set pretty high.

Okay, a question from Kelly. Can I send a link for people to send files to me? Yes. When you are in Secure Share under the request tab, you'll see over on the right-hand side there is a link that you can put into your email signature. You can copy and paste that into your email signature. You probably want to hyperlink it with some nicer messaging than our URL, but there is a link. So again, you go to Secure Share, choose request, and then in the right-hand corner is a copy link for your email signature.

There was a question about an API or solution for sending out encrypted files on a recurring schedule. Not natively in Secure Share, although I would be very interested in hearing more about your use case because we may have other solutions for you. Marco, we can reach out to you after the webinar to get some more details. 

All right. I think we have all the questions. If we missed something, I do apologize for that, but please go to support.virtru.com and open up a ticket. We would be happy to reach out to you. Thanks for attending, and I hope you all found this helpful. Thank you.