Why do I need to encrypt my files?

Corporate financial data, human resource information, customer personal particulars, product pricing and quotations, confidential contracts and decisions, as well as intellectual property (IP) constitute digital assets of an enterprise. These invaluable corporate assets exist as persistence data in enterprise storage systems in form of files. Statistics have shown that the more efficient the corporate perimeter control, the higher chance an enterprise suffers from insiders' attack.

System administrators and operators get hold of super user access to any system of an enterprise and are able to reveal any confidential contents on disks and tapes. Other contributing factors including storage consolidation, disaster recovery (DR), backup, replication and outsourcing increase chances secret data get exposed to unauthorized third party. Electronic intrusion and poor management of backup media logistics and storage worsen the problem.

To combat the security threat of sensitive data exposure, the most efficient strategy from old school technical literature suggests encryption. Data encryption is the turning-gold-into-rust process by use of complex mathematical operations. Encrypted, or ciphered data exist as garbage to unauthorized accessers and to reveal the true contents, one can only proceed to exhaustively undo the cryptographic operations by ad-hoc try-an-error method, and such random and brute-force hack are generally considered computationally impossible. Data encryption is a computational intensive task which is not suitable for general purpose business systems and is not welcomed by existing production applications. By far, even though there are encryption products that take the forms of utilities or toolkits, none has made the attempt to operate on operational files and transparently encrypt and decrypt contents on-the-fly. Major technical challenges for secure key management, scalability, portability, platform support and storage support.

Bloombase StoreSafe is a ground-breaking storage protection product for enterprise data encryption. It is a high performance hardware appliance operating on network layer, guarantees to support all application and storage platforms and excels among software-based peers.