One of the inconvenient truths of dealing with professional services firms is that even after all the data privacy scares, they just don't get it. Accountancies, law firms, real estate companies and so on still send out extremely confidential information by ordinary email to their clients (or information about their clients to other firms). When you press them on it, they offer the excuse that the information needs to get out right away. What they really mean is either that they don't want to lose a paying client by keeping privacy standards high, or they can't be personally bothered encrypting anything. So much for professional compliance with privacy and confidentiality standards.

Until now. Enter a new product that we predict will be disruptive across all professional services categories. It goes by the name of "QuickLock", and it encrypts emails. Already I can hear people moaning that there are literally dozens of products on the market already. That's right, and that's the problem - dozens of products that practically nobody uses. Why not? The truth of the matter is that if you want to create a winning security product for email, it has to be so simple that even the lawyers and accountants can use it. QuickLock fits the bill. Let's take an example of the steps needed to use the system:

Step One - register, and get a new email address and password. That's it, one step and you're done. Larry the Lawyer or Chloe the Client can now start sending emails to everybody.

If the email goes to someone using the system, it gets encrypted. Otherwise, the email is sent as plaintext. It just doesn't get any simpler than this. And when Chloe the Client receives an encrypted email from Larry the Lawyer, she double clicks on the PDF attachment, is prompted for her password, and opens both the original email together with all its attachments in one go. She then gets to edit whatever she wants, clicks "reply" and presto... everything gets shipped back to Larry in encrypted form. She doesn't need to do anything at all to encrypt her stuff. The sheer simplicity of the system is awesome.

QuickLock is something an enterprise IT department will like, too, because of the deployment options. One is the Hybrid Cloud - a private, on-premise data center/infrastructure connection to a QuickLock instance, or a standalone instance specifically set up and configured for your organization to handle secure emails. There is no hardware to manage and maintain. This setup is a highly scalable way to exchange emails from your organization to the outside world.

Still, the one I think that will really catch on is the appliance option. In this scenario, the IT department installs the QuickLock Appliance behind its own corporate firewall, and has full control of system management. This setup replaces or integrates with the current email server of your organization.Under either scenario, the QuickLock folks can't read the emails, but the organization's IT department may need to be able scan them for other reasons, and it will be able to.

Best of all, the product is a made-in-North-America solution, using Azure and AWS cloud services. It's about time somebody did this right, and one look at this tells me QuickLock has got it right.