[April 10, 2012]

Enterprise Strategy Group Research Urges Enterprises to Unify Encryption and Key Management

Click to tweet: #ESG research report available from #Vormetric outlines risks and costs of ad hoc #encryption and #key management.

Vormetric, Inc., the leader in enterprise encryption and key management, today announced that Jon Oltsik, Senior Principal Analyst with independent research firm Enterprise Strategy Group (News - Alert), Inc. (ESG) has published a paper entitled, "Enterprise Encryption and Key Management Strategy: The Time is Now." The report presents new research findings on the use of data encryption in enterprise networks. Among the findings, Oltsik warns that encryption technologies are being implemented in a disorganized, ad hoc manner that leads to increased security risks and costs, and provides a recommended framework to address these shortcomings.

The ESG report may be downloaded at: http://bit.ly/IbFk20.

According to Oltsik, "When it comes to information strategy, large organizations tend to focus on firefighting rather than long-term strategy. Unfortunately, this short-sighted approach has its limits. Ad hoc encryption leads to redundant processes, complex operations, and high costs while placing sensitive data at risk of accidental compromise or malicious insider attack."

Several factors are driving the increase in data encryption, including: regulatory ompliance, an increase in publicly disclosed breaches, and the need to protect intellectual property from advanced persistent threats (APTs). According to ESG, 54% of organizations have deployed data encryption technologies in response to APTs.

Data Encryption Growing Pains

"Current point products do a good job of protecting private data in isolated areas, but they don't provide a comprehensive solution to data privacy issues across the enterprise," states Oltsik.

The report cites the four most common enterprise encryption and key management shortcomings as:

1. A lack of standards and management by disparate functional IT groups without data security expertise

2. No central command and control - each tool has its own policies, provisioning and management of keys

3. Disorganized key management systems that place data at risk for a security breach and unrecoverable critical files

4. Organizational misalignment that doesn't address insider threats by providing adequate access management and separation of duties

"CISOs have lots of choices with ad hoc encryption, but they will find a much shorter list of qualified vendors as they begin researching and evaluating options for an enterprise encryption and key management architecture," concluded Olstik.

The report provides the following checklist for evaluating vendors that can support a unified encryption and management key strategy on an enterprise scale:

• Support for heterogeneous servers including Linux, UNIX, and Windows
• Protection for structured and unstructured data
• Centralized policy creation and management
• Distributed policy enforcement
• Tiered administration
• Separation of duties
• Key management that spans both third party and DBMS-based encryption

"Encryption is being implemented on a broad scale, driven by increased threats from the outside as well as within the organization," said Tina Stewart, vice president of marketing for Vormetric. "This ESG research report explains the risk and costs associated with fragmented approaches to encryption, and advantages of developing a top/down plan to centralize its management and control."

About Vormetric

Vormetric (@Vormetric) is the leader in enterprise system encryption. The Vormetric Data Security product line provides a single, manageable and scalable solution to manage any key and encrypt any file, any database, any application, anywhere it resides- without sacrificing application performance and avoiding key management complexity. Some of the largest and most security conscious organizations and government agencies in the world, including 15 of the Fortune 25, have standardized on Vormetric to provide strong, easily manageable data security. Vormetric technology has previously been selected by IBM (News - Alert) as the database encryption solution for DB2 and Informix on Linux^TM, Unix® and Windows; and by Symantec to provide the Symantec Veritas NetBackup^TM Media Server Encryption Option. For more information, visit www.vormetric.com.

Vormetric is a trademark of Vormetric, Inc. All other names mentioned are trademarks, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.

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