Unylogix offers data encryption solutions for protecting your critical data - we have solutions for both tape-based storage and for protecting primary disk storage. Our solutions are hardware units designed to encrypt and decrypt data "on the fly" between a host server system and its storage media (whether tape drive or disk drive).

Protecting Tape-Based Storage via Encryption

Secondary storage provides for greater application availability, recovery, and business continuity. It also provides a greater potential for unauthorized access to data.

The vast majority of secondary storage solutions, including backup and disaster recovery, employ tape media. As you often transfers this type of storage and data to multiple locations and on various mediums, the risks of unauthorized data access, theft or corruption mount. The progression toward greater storage consolidation and managed storage services (e.g. vaulting) also adds risk. Consolidated and even direct attached storage must be able to serve more access points. Portable storage media, readily available internally and sent outside the protection of the data center, is inherently at risk to theft.

The rapid growth of sensitive, trusted, and regulated data also presents additional privacy requirements. The use of more distributed storage resources and more immediate recovery compounds the need for storage security to evolve beyond physical protection - else data access exposures could directly affect business recovery and liability.

Tape-Based encryption focuses on "data at rest" and risk mitigation pertaining to tape and virtualized tape. It also provides the unique requirements to satisfy encryption adoption for secondary storage: backup compatibility, process integration, media integrity, compression and secure recovery.

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Protecting Primary Disk Storage

Primary storage access has seen a tremendous jump in use and capacity over the past years. Advances in storage means that a variety of disk storage systems are in use and these varied types of disk storage - whether based on SCSI, Fibre Channel (SAN) or packet based IP networks (NAS) - translates into more ways for accessing sensitive data.

In the process, corporations have tried to consolidate data - often by establishing and deploying new SAN-based networked storage systems that are electronically available to multiple applications, multiple locations, dispersed users, and different business processes.

However, advances in storage area network (SAN) data access (such as iSCSI), data replication, and network extension enable data to flow beyond the confines of the data center. The key challenge facing IT managers who are deploying network and distributed storage is figuring out how to secure this data while still providing access to the appropriate people.

This is where security of storage is of utmost importance. And the market for security products has changed dramatically since the days of mainframe-style data security. Although most security products have adapted to meet customer demand, security for data storage did not change. SANs require new adaptations of well-accepted security controls, which include:
• Device-, network-, application-, and user-level authentication
• Device, network, application, and user entitlements
  and most importantly whithin this context
• High-speed, embedded data encryption

Data is no longer confined to the glass house, and as a result, access to it on SANs must be secured — with an array of security controls and procedures — to avoid downtime, misuse, loss, theft, and data corruption.

Whether File or Block oriented storage access, additional storage service appliances introduced in the I/O path, particularly encryption devices, need to perform more complex processing functions at the data level, including deep frame classification, protocol inspection, address/payload modification and integrity checks.

A proper data encryption mechanism for primary storage I/O, requires an architecture with fast,low-latency, store/forward processing of storage data. Your primary data path encryption solution needs to deliver the same guaranteed speed as is available today in high-speed SANs, storage servers and I/O controllers.

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Why Use Encryption? Types of Applications Requiring Data Encryption?

Are you immune from tempering and illegal access to your precious data? Most businesses may not even be aware that people are accessing their important data illegally. For example, access to your offsite backup tapes provides an excellent way for "data thieves" to anyone in your organization ever finding out that your critical data has been copied, accessed, etc...

Read-on to find the types of applications that are most likely to cause 'data security leaks' and which should be covered by data storage encryption technology.