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Lots of the best secure email providers use their own platforms and clients, but Virtru is an enterprise-level product designed to integrate with your existing workflows – which means that, in theory, Virtru should seamlessly start protecting sensitive data in your organization.
Indeed, Virtru’s secure collaboration and email product is deeply integrated with Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft SharePoint, and its Secure Share module integrates with Google Drive, Microsoft SharePoint, OneDrive, Zendesk, and Confluence.
Elsewhere, Virtru works with SaaS products from Salesforce, ServiceNow, Kustomer and more. Virtru’s own Data Security Platform delivers secure collaboration and sharing beyond those apps thanks to an agnostic platform.
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In short, then, Virtru works with loads of apps and systems. And, as you may have guessed, this is an enterprise-level product that’s not suitable for individuals who need secure email.
Virtru: Plans and pricingÂ
Despite the service’s complexity, Virtru’s products are divided into four tiers, which makes pricing a bit easier to understand.
The Starter package is ideal for smaller businesses that need email protection. It costs $119/£94 per month for a five-user package. With that offering, you get secure email for Gmail and Outlook, Virtru’s full slate of email and file protection abilities, administrator controls, and integration with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Basic support is also included.
The Business package, again for five users, costs $219/£174 per month. It includes everything in the Starter package and Virtru Secure Share, bulk decryption, integration with Google Workspace CSE and Google Vault, SSO compatibility, an audit log APU and custom branding for your business. You also get a 99.9% guaranteed uptime SLA.
(Image credit: Virtru)
If you’re willing to pay extra, you can also add optional virtual private key stores and integrations with other third-party tools.
The next tier costs $399/£317 per month, again for five users. It includes everything in the Business package, as well as features designed for organizations that do business with US federal agencies.
It’s built to help ensure compliance with CMMC, DFARS 7012, and ITAR. It also includes FIPS 140-2 validated encryption.
It includes moderate FedRAMP ATO and a Virtru shared responsibility matrix for CMMC documentation. It also allows your organization to host private encryption keys. You also get deployment support, phone support and a dedicated customer success team. Premium support is also available as an optional extra.
The top package, Enterprise, uses custom pricing. It includes everything from the previous products alongside integration with Zendesk, Salesforce, and more SaaS systems. You can also add optional integrations with more systems and premium support.
It goes without saying that when you want to expand a package that includes support for five users, the price will rise accordingly.
Virtru: Features
Virtru is a far-reaching, complex product, but underneath it all you’ll find robust security credentials. Virtru’s systems use Trusted Data Format, or TDF, which is an open-source end-to-end encryption standard that protects your data at every stage of its lifecycle.
Underneath all of that, you’ll find AES 256-bit encryption, and it’s worth bearing in mind that encryption keys are not stored on Virtru’s servers – so you can control who has access to those, too.
This decentralized approach means you and your organization can maintain complete control over your data and its protection, and this zero-trust model ensures extra layers of security. Additionally, Virtru’s reliance on TDF means that you can embed policies and encryption directly into individual apps and objects across your organization’s workflows, which means you benefit from flexibility and full control.
Beyond the excellent underlying format, you can deploy attribute-based access control to enforce who can access your content dynamically.
Virtru’s underlying security prioritizes protection, control, and flexibility, and this ethos is evident in other features of its software suite.
Opt for its Google or Microsoft-integrated products, and you can secure your email and cloud storage data, encrypt meetings, safeguard documents, protect presentations and ensure data privacy.
Choose file-sharing integrations, and you can meet advanced compliance requirements, monitor and audit your data, give collaborators an effortless experience and, again, keep your data protected.
Virtru’s Data Protection Gateway protects emails and files before they leave your domain with inbound and outbound end-to-end encryption to ensure total protection for sensitive information, no matter the services involved.
Virtru’s Data Security Platform uses a zero-trust architecture and granular controls to ensure that your business has complete control over its data and who can access it.
Virtru: Interface and in-use
(Image credit: Virtru)
Virtru’s interface is a little different from many other secure email products – because this is a necessarily complex service that takes a different approach.
Instead of signing in to a web client, for instance, Virtru largely integrates with your existing software, with management handled by Virtru’s Control Center. In this regard, Virtru is excellent: its interfaces and management apps are attractive, well-designed and easy to navigate as long as you’ve got the requisite experience dealing with complex administrative tools.
Given Virtru’s high-end abilities, your organization should already have people who are well-versed in those apps.
(Image credit: Virtru)
Virtru: Support
Varying levels of support are available with different Virtru products: at the lower levels, you get online help, and if you pay for the higher-end products, you can add phone support, a dedicated success team, premium options and deployment help to the package.
Those latter options are precisely the kind of support features we’d expect from a high-end enterprise product like Virtru.
In addition, Virtru’s website has an extensive knowledge base and basic live chat functionality.
Virtru: The competition
Virtru’s status as a high-end, enterprise-grade secure email and data product means it competes with similar products, such as Zoho’s suite of business apps. Indeed, Virtru even competes with Google and Microsoft, albeit with a greater focus on security and encryption.
In many ways, though, Virtru stands alone. Zoho is more focused on productivity across a wider variety of apps, and Google and Microsoft are designed to act as the underlying tools beneath Virtru. There isn’t much out there that offers the broad concentration on enterprise-level security and protection like Virtru.
Virtru: Final verdict
That leaves Virtru in a good position, especially with larger organizations – and that’s no surprise, because there’s lots to like about this product.
It’s packed with features and has excellent security credentials. The overall design of the Data Security Platform means that Virtru’s tools should integrate smoothly with virtually all of your systems.
Virtru can undoubtedly become expensive, but you get what you pay for – and if you’re a large business that wants to take data protection seriously, you should be considering Virtru.
