Tag: cloud security

Based on Equinix’s experience in providing encryption and connectivity services for globally distributed enterprises, we share three best practices—cloud-neutral encryption key management services, private connections and partner ecosystems—for securely managing content and media data/assets.

What was physical is rapidly becoming digital, as every industry undergoes a digital transformation. Digital wallets, with details about your identity and your credit card information encrypted somewhere in the cloud, are replacing credit and debit cards, which have largely replaced printed currency and checks. Newspapers, magazines, music and movies are consumed digitally. Robotics eliminate manual assembly processes and deliver consistent quality at lower cost. The notion of driving a car may soon become as outdated as dialing a phone.

When compute processing, content and data move to the cloud and data sources become more geographically dispersed, protecting those assets can be a challenge. Security controls need to extend out to the edge to deliver robust and reliable data and application privacy, protection and compliance.

The cloud, mobile devices, the Internet of Things (IoT) and the proliferation of software applications that touch nearly every aspect of quotidian activity create ever-greater volumes of data. These, unfortunately, are targets of nefarious individuals, organizations and government entities seeking financial gain or major economic or operational disruption.

Imagine knowing everything about a customer before they come through the door – name, preferences and interests, buying history, who they are connected to, where they live, and more. That kind of intelligence makes it easy to strike up a conversation with the customer and make the right recommendations that can lead to sales. The more you know, the more chances you have to win.

Data gravity boosts the value of your data, especially when analytics are applied. Larger volumes of data provide greater insight into and understanding of the sources that generate the data: customers, devices, machinery, vehicles, et cetera. Size matters: A database of ten million customers holds greater business value and potential for insight than a database of ten thousand customers.

When we talk to companies around the world, a common topic of discussion is the transformational nature of cloud technologies. In a very short time, the cloud has disrupted every aspect of how IT infrastructure, resources and software are deployed and managed. While there’s near-universal agreement on the economic benefits of this, it’s not all good news: In these discussions, the conversation invariably turns toward the growing challenges of cloud security management - in particular, the management of the encryption keys that are fundamental to cloud security.

Recent technological advances, such as the advent of the cloud and improvements in the areas of global communications, commodity storage and processing speed, give organizations the ability to store data anywhere in the world and manage it remotely. While these advances have undeniable benefits, they’ve also created drawbacks for global organizations, which must contend with an ever-widening set of data regulations. These regulations govern the acquisition, storage and processing of any personally identifiable information associated with customers and employees, as well as the critical operational data associated with utilities, urban infrastructure and transportation. For data security experts, this means increased demands and a heightened workload.

Enterprises should consider a vendor-neutral HSM-as-a-Service that provides the protection and a service level agreement (SLA) to effectively support the “shared-responsibility” model between cloud providers and their customers.

Guarding against data breaches becomes even more challenging as organizations move data and applications from the security of their on-premise IT infrastructure to the cloud, where the responsibility for protecting data is shared with the cloud provider. Because encryption keys play a vital role in this scenario by shielding data from potential breaches, the approach to encryption key management requires careful evaluation.