Meet the latest EPMS requirements — and boost your data security strategy

Written by: David Land, Vice President/Sales – APAC

Have you updated your agency to the Email Protective Marking Standard (EPMS) version 2018.2? As you likely know, changes to the standard went into effect 1 January 2019. 

Since the last iteration was released in 2010, the EPMS standard has been amended. The changes include updates to the range of security classifications, changes to specific markings and caveat types, as well as new language used for the markings. 

Make the transition seamlessly
Perhaps you’re thinking, “Where should we begin to make this transition to EPMS 2018.2?” One place to start is by updating your technologies to accommodate the new marking standard.

As the first technology company to develop tools that could enable government agencies to easily comply with EPMS, Titus knows the standard inside and out. Our user-friendly categorisation tools help agencies clearly and accurately classify emails, documents, spreadsheets, presentations and other files with user-selected, system-suggested or automatically applied settings, based on your data security policies. Further, this capability has been extended to include machine learning functionality to help automatically identify sensitive information and mark it appropriately.  

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Titus integrates seamlessly with employee workflows, enabling your organisation to more easily gain end user buy-in to identify sensitive assets. Titus provides automatic marking functionality to help educate and support users in correct information handling.

Titus has stayed abreast of every change along the way and evolved our technologies to accommodate each new version of EPMS. The latest Titus release provides support for v2018.2 of the standard and is already in use by over 30 federal agencies.

The transition to the new framework will not be a 1:1 mapping. Titus has released tailored solutions for Australian government agencies and contractors, which can help ease the transition from previous versions of the standard. Titus is also interoperable with previous versions, allowing organisations to transition either gradually or immediately.

Standardise across all unstructured data
While EPMS strictly applies to email messages, most agencies aim to replicate these marking standards across documents and files. A manual or template approach to rolling this out is not only inefficient but also increases the risk of inaccurate marking and lacks basic process controls. From a security perspective, the risk of wrongly marked information being leaked or shared inappropriately goes up significantly. Titus capabilities seamlessly support any file type using the same policy engine to ensure marking standards are enforced. In addition, custom metadata can be written to accurately identify information. Critically, Titus enables organisations to protect, share and store their sensitive information appropriately and consistently.   

Boost your data protection strategy
EPMS compliance is critical, but today an equally serious concern is security. Every year, cybercrime becomes more and more sophisticated. Titus customers are now investing significantly more into a data-centric security strategy that enables them to better manage external and internal threats. 

As a Titus customer, you automatically have robust data protection capabilities at your disposal. Titus solutions are based on a powerful, flexible policy engine that supports accurate tagging and enforces appropriate information sharing, both within your agency and externally. The latest Titus capability extends protection to data at rest and at creation, in the cloud and on premises, as well as on platforms including Office 365, Mac OS and Google Suite. 

Clear, accurate metadata not only enables users to share information securely within their organisation but through proven integration can also make your email gateways and other security tools — such as data loss prevention (DLP) technologies, encryption solutions and cloud access security brokers (CASBs) — more effective, helping them to know precisely when to block, allow, perform threat analysis or instigate rights management policies. In this way, all of your security tools are working together to recognise and protect sensitive official information as your team does its job. 

Let’s talk about how to turn this EPMS transition into a real boon for your security strategy! Contact the Titus Australian Government team at [email protected] or +61 403 541 476 to get started.