Changes to Essex County Council secure email

Essex County Council (ECC) have changed the way their secure emails are sent and received between partners.

The Government has mandated a new approach to implementing secure email communications between government organisations (e.g. those who use the @gsi, @gse, @gsx, @pnn, @nhs.net email suffixes).

As a result, ECC has set up its secure email service in line with these new Government requirements.

What is changing?

Instead of using GCSx secure email, Essex County Council have had their @essex.gov.uk email service accredited as secure. This means that all emails to and from what used to be their non-secure accounts are now as safe as if we were sending to their GCSX accounts.

What do we need to do?

Nothing! Encryption happens automatically in the background.

When will this change happen?

It is already in place:

From 09:00 on 11 March 2019, all secure emails that ECC currently send via GCSx are now sent via our Microsoft Outlook and will be then transmitted via the in-transit encryption (known as TLS) to those partners who have similar in-transit encryption in place.

If you have sent any emails to a GCSX account since Monday, 11 March, you should have received an out of office informing you of the change and where to send your email instead.

What is Egress Switch and do we need it?

ECC also use a system called Egress Switch, which has the ability to encrypt emails. However, this is only being used when they are aware email recipients don’t have such encryption in place, so will not be needed when they are communicating with NHS.net accounts.

If you have any questions, please get in touch via the IG teams inbox EssexCCG.IG@nhs.net