• by Ray Schultz , November 5, 2018

MessageGears has launched a data encryption feature that it says will allows B2C marketers to communicate with consumers without exposing personally identifiable information (PII) to internal teams or third-party legacy marketing clouds.

The objective is to help enterprise clients that have ”concerns about sending personally identifiable customer data to the cloud where it’s outside their control and vulnerable to security breaches,” states Dan Roy, chief product officer and co-founder of MessageGears. 

The feature is being added to Accelerator, the firm’s email marketing platform. It was developed for Chick-fil-A, a firm that sought to protect customer data against attacks. 

The new security feature relies on Amazon Web Services and key management service encryption to anonymize customer data, MessageGears says.

Internal network administrators can see only a string of letters and numbers rather than PII, it adds.

The firm says each row of data contains an encrypted data key that cannot be retrieved without going through KMS encryption. 

Decryption is needed only when individual campaigns are being launched. Under the company’s “render and send” cloud environment, data is deleted once a message has been rendered.

The encryption can be used when sending personalized email, push notifications or text messages. 

Roger Barnette, CEO of MessageGears, states that data security issues prevent “enterprise marketers from building the ambitious email campaigns that aren’t possible on legacy marketing clouds.”