Even as mobility and cloud take off, too many companies still leave data in the clear, spooked by operational concerns. Yes, key management remains a problem. But can you really afford not to encrypt?

Michael A. Davis, CTO of CounterTack

December 6, 2012

3 Min Read

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5 Rules For Painless Encryption

5 Rules For Painless Encryption

You can't talk about big IT trends without running into data protection worries. For the 728 business technology pros responding to our InformationWeek 2013 Outlook Survey, which explores spending and technology priorities for the coming year, "improve information security" ranked No. 1 among 19 projects. This makes perfect sense; whether your company is fixated on big data, public cloud, BYOD or mobile app development, security plays a key role.

Yet even as mobility and cloud take off, many companies still leave data in the clear, worried about operational and performance concerns. Never mind that major compliance and regulatory frameworks either require or strongly recommend data encryption. Yes, key management remains a problem. But there are ways to use encryption without breaking your infrastructure while we wait on the ultimate solution: identity-based encryption. Here are five rules that help.

Rule 1: Stop The Bleeding

Strategy: 5 Keys to Painless Encryption

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IT's natural inclination is to standardize on a single encryption vendor, since interoperability is notoriously spotty. But if you look at the top five types of encryption used by respondents to our InformationWeek 2012 Data Encryption Survey -- VPN, email, backup, file and disk, in that order -- no single provider can cover all of them. That lapse is no excuse for a free-for-all, though. We see too many IT organizations letting individual project leads make decisions about what types of encryption to use, what products to buy and even how to manage these systems once they're in place. While we do encourage flexibility, complete decentralization rarely ends well. At minimum, require that a central team approve all new encryption software buys, rules and implementations. This same group must ensure that processes, such as certificate management, are updated to include the new software project that teams want to implement. This one simple change dramatically reduces the sprawl of encryption products and processes. And don't forget the vendor management group during this process.

Rule 2: Pick Your Battles

Don't try to do everything within a narrow set of encryption best practices, and if you're lacking in this area, certainly don't try to put encryption everywhere at once. Instead, perform a risk assessment, prioritize requests and analyze the potential volume of keys and certificates to determine where to focus. The conventional approach is to pick an encryption system based on your data classification scheme and types of sensitive data, but you should also look at the ways encryption tool management can break down. Problems usually hit during key rotations and because of weak passwords or certificate expirations rather than the encryption algorithm itself being breached. Manage the weakest link.

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About the Author(s)

Michael A. Davis

CTO of CounterTack

Michael A. Davis has been privileged to help shape and educate the globalcommunity on the evolution of IT security. His portfolio of clients includes international corporations such as AT&T, Sears, and Exelon as well as the U.S. Department of Defense. Davis's early embrace of entrepreneurship earned him a spot on BusinessWeek's "Top 25 Under 25"
list, recognizing his launch of IT security consulting firm Savid Technologies, one of the fastest-growing companies of its decade. He has a passion for educating others and, as a contributing author for the *Hacking Exposed* books, has become a keynote speaker at dozens of conferences and symposiums worldwide.

Davis serves as CTO of CounterTack, provider of an endpoint security platform delivering real-time cyberthreat detection and forensics. He joined the company because he recognized that the battle is moving to the endpoint and that conventional IT security technologies can't protect enterprises. Rather, he saw a need to deliver to the community continuous attack monitoring backed by automated threat analysis.

Davis brings a solid background in IT threat assessment and protection to his latest posting, having been Senior Manager Global Threats for McAfee prior to launching Savid, which was acquired by External IT. Aside from his work advancing cybersecurity, Davis writes for industry publications including InformationWeek and Dark Reading. Additionally, he has been a partner in a number of diverse entrepreneurial startups; held a leadership position at 3Com; managed two Internet service providers; and recently served as President/CEO of the InClaro Group, a firm providing information security advisory and consulting services based on a unique risk assessment methodology.

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