Success Story Main-Kinzig County Council: eGovernment with secure Email

“We needed a solution to send confidential emails to recip- The Main-Kinzig ients with both S/MIME and PGP clients. However, it is dif- county extends from ficult to set up an in-house client based solution. Z1 Secure- the outskirts of Frank- furt to the Bavarian Mail Gateway is great software. It automatically manages Spessart forest. Cov- all security tasks including encryption and digital signing. ering a total area of approximately 1,400 The administration interface simplifies certificate manage- square kilometers, it is home to the ment and setting up policies. The end users on the other Main-Kinzig county with over 400,000 hand don’t have to worry about security at all”. inhabitants, making it the most populous county in the state of Hesse. The IT de- Kevin Kuntz, System Administrator at Main-Kinzig county council. partment has 18 employees spread over the multiple sites. The IT infrastructure is state of the art. The Main-Kinzig county Initial Situation at Main-Kinzig The Z1 SecureMail Gateway from Zer- (MKK) has a leading IT and IT security County Council tificon Solutions GmbH was selected role at local and national level. The email as the preferred solution. The software infrastructure is based on Microsoft Out- Prior to the contract award, docu- supports key standards, is simple to ad- look and Microsoft Exchange. ments at Main-Kinzig county council minister and integrates seamlessly into (MKK) which contained personal data the IT infrastructure. With the support The Challenge were printed out, put in an envelope of the supplier, the installation and Implementation of the security polices and sent by post. configuration was performed without defined by Mainz-Kinzig county council any issues. regarding the confidentiality, authentic- Aims: Efficient and economical ity and integrity of personal data. routine tasks The training for the administrations MKK started looking for a solution to was quickly completed within two The Problem speed up routine administrative tasks. days. The only extra equipment which Client based encryption proved to be im- Through the use of email, the process was required was a server and a work- practical of the roughly 1000 email users of approving or turning applications station. at MKK. down can be improved. In addition, it Central security policies should be possible to detect fraudulent or illegal benefit requests electroni- The solution is used throughout the cally. The secure email solution must whole Main-Kinzig county for electron- meet legal requirements (e.g. federal ic communication with external part- data protection laws BDSG) and should ners as well as with other authorities be transparent to the roughly 1000 and services. The users mainly have email users. contact with the public or are looking The use of a client based solution was after social security recipients in local rejected due to the high number of offices. email users and the difficulty in imple- menting standard security policies.

Simple Email Encryption with Z1 SecureMail Gateway Based upon the above requirements, Kevin Kuntz, system administrator at MKK, investigated a number of solu- tions from different suppliers.

Zertificon Solutions GmbH 1 / 2 www.zertificon.com Success Story

Z1 SecureMail Gateway is deployed Secure electronic mail Z1 SecureMail Gateway features: as an SMTP proxy which automatical- “We haven’t seen a solution on the • Central de-/encryption as well as ly de-/encrypts, signs and validates centralised signing and electronic market which is better than Z1 Secure- email signatures. It processes the com- signature validation. Mail Gateway. Right from the start, the plete email traffic according to central • Automatic certificate management Gateway ran without any problems security policies. The policies can be • Compliant with S/MIME and PGP and through the use of secure email, completely configured by the Security international standards and follows saves time, money and helps the envi- Office via the web-based management the ISIS-MTT and S/MIME v3 stan- ronment because we no longer have to dards console. The security mechanisms can print out documents.” • Web-based administration be defined as optional or mandatory Kevin Kuntz, System Administrator • Process all email traffic according to according to the sender and recipient Main-Kinzig county council central security polices and individu- addresses or their domains. Addition- al user commands. ally, end users can control certain se- • Private key secure storage in a Hard- curity features by adding short com- ware-Security-Module (Cryptobox) mands to the email subject. e.g. from Eracom, Chrysalis/SafeNet etc.

Z1 SecureMail Gateway advantages: • Quicker standard procedures through the use of email • Universal Security policies • Reduces cost through the use of Organization/Domain certificates • Secure private key storage in Cryp- tobox protects against manipulation and theft

District Office Hanau

Zertificon Solutions GmbH tel.: +49 (0)30 5900300-0 Berlin, Germany email: [email protected] www.zertificon.com www.globaltrustpoint.com

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