Securing Data at Rest: An Enterprise Strategy for Data Encryption

Published by HP on Oct 26, 2007

The data residing on your storage systems and media, data-at-rest, presents serious security concerns. Regulations and various mandates around the world are putting the burden on companies and government entities to protect the private information they store. Increasingly, companies are being required to publicly disclose breaches that put individual's private data at risk, be it a customer, employee, shareholder, partner, or other stakeholder. The solution to the data privacy and corporate data protection challenge has been identified-encryption. Very soon, organizations will have dozens, hundreds, thousands, and potentially millions of encryption keys that must be managed, secured, and protected. These encryption keys must always be available so that data can be recovered, even in the event of a systems disruption or major disaster.

The technology to perform data encryption is widely available. What organizations need is enterprise key management to protect keys while ensuring key availability under all circumstances. This White Paper review's today's enterprise data-at-rest privacy/security landscape and examines key challenges of enterprise encryption and key management. It also assesses the current approaches to key management, introduces the concept of appliance-based enterprise key management, and identifies evaluation criteria for such an appliance.