Data Security: The Threats Are Rising

The frequency of data security breaches has risen 4X over the last ten years1, and seven of the ten largest breaches ever occurred in the year 2016.

The key target in most security breaches is any and all sensitive data stored by the targeted company or government agency. Consequently, encryption of data as early in the lifecycle as possible has become a critical requirement for eliminating security risk in private cloud infrastructure.

Data encryption is a compliance requirement for many companies operating in the healthcare (HIPAA), credit card (PCI DSS), financial reporting (SOX) as well as most government agencies. With threats rising, the requirement to encrypt data everywhere – from host-tostorage, between hosts, and between sites – is becoming standard for any organization that values the privacy of its data and the data of its customers.

Current data encryption solutions force a variety of tradeoffs, which drive companies into a mix of secure and unsecure deployments, or worse make the trade-offs too expensive to consider data encryption at all. For example, leading arrays and hyperconverged systems only protect data at rest and do not protect against host or network intrusions. Guest operating systems and hypervisors offer encryption at the source, but at the expense of data reduction required by the economics of modern flash storage.