Yet another big deployment

Today, Voltage announced that Wells Fargo has dramatically increased the size of their deployment of SecureMail, Voltage's line of products that's used to encrypt email. The new Wells Fargo deployment will be hundreds of thousands of users. While this might have been a big deal a few years ago, these days, it's almost not even newsworthy. After all, there are roughly 600,000 SecureMail users at a large retail business and another 250,000 SecureMail users at a large health care business. Each of these deployment was fairly easy, and required minimal support from Voltage's support team. If you're new to secure email, this may not sound impressive, but if you've used it for a while, this is simply astounding. Just a few years ago, there was no way to realistically deploy secure email to a few hundred thousand users unless you were the US government and didn't mind spending a billion dollars or so.

I almost feel sorry for people who are just getting their first exposure to secure email these days, because it's not really very interesting anymore. Not long ago, it definitely appealed more to computer hobbyists who enjoyed tinkering with the secure email system to get it working much like ham radio operators enjoy tinkering with their radios to get them to work. Now, it's much easier and cleaner, and hobbyists have to find other ways to amuse themselves.

The people for who Voltage's SecureMail is their first exposure to secure email won't be able to tell stories to their coworkers one day about how they overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles and actually managed to send an encrypted email. Some might not even know they're using it. There's still plenty of difficult software out there, though, so they won't miss out on the experience of fighting with it. This seems to be an unavoidable part of working in the twenty-first century.