Service Management Software: Protecting Data Through Encryption

http://www.ibm.com/ibm/servicemanagement/solutions.html?cm_mmc=agus_itmbitivv...
Gordon Arnold of IBM speaks about the advantages of data encryption. As more confidential information is being stored on drives that may be resold, protecting your data is becoming more important. By encrypting data, information can either be securely withheld or accessed only when necessary by the proper users.

[Gordon Arnold, IBM]

My names Gordon Arnold. Im a senior technical staff member here at IBM. I also chair the Storage Security Industry Forum, which is part of the Storage Networking Industry Association. So I work on encryption, key management and the strategy for data security for IBM.

Encryption has not been adopted, even though its a very good technique for data privacy, because users are concerned about performance, theyre concerned about losing their data, theyre concerned about the cost of managing the encryption and deploying the encryption, and theyre concerned about the complexity of how--what else is going to affect what theyre doing. Its appalling what people leave on disk drives in order to earn ten bucks on eBay. My favorite example there was a pharmacy that decided to resell their disk drive, and now everybodys medical records, insurance information, credit card information, was all available to this purchaser of a disk drive at $10. In fact, there are criminal organizations out purchasing used disk drives for precisely this purpose, which is why youd like to have a storage device where, when you power that storage device down, the data is protected. Theres no chance of stealing the data without having an authentication key to unlock that disk drive.

Obviously, if you encrypt your data and you throw away the key, thats actually one of the most effective ways of destroying your data. But when you want your data, you want it to be there and available and the key management to be operating in the background simply and inexpensively. So what we do is we have a simple software that installs, you set up your key store, you set up the rotation of your keys, you back it all up, and then basically you can forget about it.

So by introducing encryption actually in the storage infrastructure in a transparent key management, which weve implemented in our Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager, then you can have your applications reading and writing their data without a single change to your operating systems, a single change to your application, no performance loss, and no way that you can lose access legitimately to your own data.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• IT service management
• data storage solution
• encryption
• key management
• data security
• storage infrastructure
• IBM
• Gordon Arnold