For that, Lucich favored Secure Computing's IronMail appliance (Secure Computing is being ). Ideally, the county wanted the Voltage SecureMail server and the IronMail gateway appliance to work in harmony so that IronMail could make the decision to encrypt at certain times even if the county employee had failed to do that manually.

Lucich says he encouraged Secure Computing to figure out how to integrate IronMail with Voltage's SecureMail digital-certificate server and required them to show that was possible before finalizing a contract.

The result was what he wanted, Lucich says: "The true policy engine is in IronMail, which has to scan to decide whether to encrypt. The encryption is with SecureMail because we wanted key management the way Voltage did it." Since the e-mail encryption process went live in June, about 25% of Orange County employees have been trained on how the security method works.