The international horse show wasn’t the only event in Washington DC this week; I participated in the Virtualization, Cloud, and Green Computing event in our nation’s capital. One of the guest speakers was Ira “Gus” Hunt, CTO at the CIA. If you haven’t seen Gus speak, you are missing something. He is very strong on the technical side and extremely energetic and entertaining.
Gus focused on cloud computing activities at the CIA (I’ll blog about this soon), but I was intrigued by one of his slide bullets that referred to something he called the “encrypted enterprise.” From the CIA’s perspective, all data is sensitive whether it resides on an enterprise disk system, lives in a database column, crosses an Ethernet switch, or gets backed up on a USB drive. Because of this, Hunt wants to create an “encrypted enterprise” where data is encrypted at all layers of the technology stack.
The CIA is ahead here, but ESG hears a similar goal from lots of other highly regulated firms. When will this happen? Unfortunately, it may take a few years to weave this together as there are several hurdles to overcome including:
A lot of the technical limitations are being worked on at this point, so the biggest impediment may be based upon people and not technology. We simply don’t have a lot of experience here, so we need to proceed with research, thought, and caution. To get to Gus Hunt’s vision of the “encrypted enterprise,” we need things like reference architectures, best practices, and maturity models as soon as possible. Look for service providers like CSC, HP, IBM, and SAIC to offer “encrypted enterprise” services within the next 24 months.
Tags: CIA, CSC, EFS, EMC, Emulex, Encrypted enterprise, Gus Hunt, HP, IBM, KMIP, Microsoft, Oracle, PGP, RSA, SAIC, Symantec Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
While many folks were sunning themselves at the beach this past summer, IBM introduced some pretty important security technology: the Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager (TKLS). Basically, the TKLS products are designed to create, manage, secure, and store encryption keys as a service.
What’s so special about this? First, key management is one of those IT security disciplines that will go from relatively esoteric to an enterprise requirement in the next year or so. Why? More and more data is being encrypted each day, so key management is becoming increasingly important. Stolen encryption keys could compromise the confidentiality of sensitive data while lost encryption keys could transform critical data into meaningless ones and zeros. Pretty soon, all large enterprises will have something resembling TKLS.
As far as IBM TKLS goes, it looks good to me because:
In general, neither key management nor TKLS will get much visibility or industry recognition — key management is just a bit too geeky for most IT folks. Nevertheless, next-generation cloud computing will depend upon ubiquitous trust and data security. IBM gets this more than most. Think of TKLS as its part of its security plumbing for a smarter planet.
Tags: HP, IBM, KMIP, RSA, SafeNet, Smarter Planet, TKLS Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Today, Symantec announced that it is acquiring two encryption companies: GuardianEdge and PGP. Some will see this as a late counter-punch to Check Point‘s acquisition of PointSec, McAfee‘s acquisition of SafeBoot, and Sophos‘s acquisition of Utimaco. In other words, Symantec is finally getting in the full-disk encryption game, primarily on laptops.
Wrong interpretation. Symantec does get endpoint encryption technology, but there is a lot more here than meets the eye. In my humble opinion, Symantec also gets:
In the next few years, large organizations will realize that encryption technologies have become ubiquitous across the enterprise with no central management. This could be a real problem for data restoration, especially in a disaster recovery situation. At that point, they will look for partners to bring order, processes, and central control to this chaos. As of today, Symantec is extremely well positioned for this burgeoning–and extremely critical–market opportunity.
Tags: Check Point, Chosen Security, encryption, GuardianEdge, IEEE, KMIP, McAfee, PGP, PKI, Symantec Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
CA entered the key management market this week, joining others such as HP, IBM, EMC/RSA, PGP, and Thales. CA’s announcement was relatively quiet, but it is still significant because:
With its focus on the mainframe, CA didn’t get much attention with this announcement, but large enterprises — especially in financial services, defense, law enforcement, and intelligence — will recognize the value here right away.
In the meantime, this announcement also helps the rest of us who care about the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of our data.
Tags: CA, encryption, key management, KMIP, mainframe, Oasis, System z Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
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