Recently, Jen Hindle wrote about unsharing your data, and the three steps to make it happen:
- First, locate your sensitive data.
- Next, encrypt it.
- And finally, own and manage your keys.
So how do you go about doing this across your enterprise? Many of you probably find your organization deploying multiple data protection projects in silos to react to different mandates, meet the security requirements of individual business units, or address a security breach.
If you find yourself doing patchwork deployments when what you really want is a smart, long-term data protection strategy, then it’s time to enable encryption as an IT service.
What is Encryption as an IT Service?
Extending the “as-a-service” concept to your enterprise enables your IT and security teams to become a service provider, combining resources to unify and centralize services for encryption and key management. Once encryption as an IT service is deployed, your internal “customers” have a single place to go to subscribe to the services they need to address all of their data protection needs. The result is a simple, cost-effective, elastic, and more secure service that is available across different solutions, data centers, geographies, environments, or all of these areas.
By enabling your IT group to act as a service provider, encryption and key management can be centralized but distributed. This means that consistent security policies can be set across the organization’s varied encryption deployments, allowing them to be updated as needed automatically, with ease, while business owners make sure their data is kept separate. Standards can be maintained throughout. The IT and security teams can utilize their knowledge effectively to provide high-level APIs with consistent security parameters across the organization. At the same time, internal consumers– from business unit leaders to developers, or the actual applications, databases, or file servers registered to the “service”- can benefit from the economies of scale and security provided by this consolidated and comprehensive approach to data protection.
As efforts are consolidated in a “one-stop-shop” service, “build once” solutions can be replicated effectively and overlapping encryption solutions can be avoided. For example, developers don’t decide on key types or sizes, as they are already abstracted by APIs, ensuring that security remains in the hands of the security experts. Auditing and compliance tracking is also simplified as it is centralized.
A Streamlined, Repeatable Model for Centralized, Enterprise-wide Encryption
By moving past silo-constrained encryption and deploying encryption as an IT service centrally, uniformly, and at scale across the enterprise, your organization can benefit from unmatched coverage— whether you are securing databases, applications, file servers, and storage in the traditional data center, virtualized environments, and/or the cloud, and as the data moves between these different environments.
When complemented by centralized key management, your organization can apply data protection where it needs it, when it needs it, and how it needs it—according to the unique needs of your business.
Armed with these encryption-as-an-IT-service capabilities, your organization can realize a host of benefits:
- Strengthened security
- Reinforced compliance and reduced audit costs
- Reduced security and IT costs
- Increased IT and business agility
Ready to break down the silos? Start delivering Encryption as an IT Service across your organization and improve your security posture, reduce costs, and increase business agility. To find out how, download our Encryption as an IT Service white paper.
