Encryption: The Business Case Protecting Data At Rest

While network and Internet security have been addressed through rigorous authentication and encryption to restrict access to sensitive personal, financial, and medical information, data at rest remains vulnerable. Restricting access to data backups has been accomplished primarily by restricting access to the backup media. Yet a single backup tape might contain millions of credit card transactions, thousands of medical records, and multiple copies of a company's public and not-so-public financial data. A single backup tape can also fall off a truck, be mislaid in a warehouse, fit in a jacket pocket of a disgruntled worker, or be retrieved by dumpster divers after a tape has been discarded.

Compliance with privacy regulations and explicit legal liability for accidentally exposed information are forcing many organizations to revisit their protection procedures for backup data and media.

Several high profile examples have underscored the difficulty of the fortress approach. Companies with the most data tend to be the companies with the most sensitive data. It's unreasonable to expect that many thousands of backup tapes can be transported, stored, and discarded without a few that end up exposed to misfeasance or malfeasance.

A better solution is to encrypt the backup data, in the same way data is encrypted in network transfers. Like encrypted network data, this gives authorized users easy access while making it nearly impossible for unauthorized users to access data.

Encrypting data prior to storage can be accomplished in several ways, but most have substantive disadvantages in cost, performance, scalability, or management. Spectra Logic Corporation's BlueScale™ Encryption integrates hardware encryption directly into the electronics of a tape library, offering a practical, affordable, and scalable option. BlueScale exploits elements in the modular architecture of Spectra® libraries to provide an easy-to-manage encryption solution.