Top Five Recommendations for Encrypting Laptop Data - Best Practices Guide

Best Practices Guide - May 2010
Top Five Recommendations forEncrypting Laptop Data
Best Practices Guide
By DatacastleMay 2010
ContentsExecutive Summary 1Protecting Laptop Data at All Times 1Understanding the "Key" to Encryption Best Practices 2Best Practices for Encrypting Laptop Data 3-6Top Five Recommendations for Encrypting Laptop Data
Best Practices Guide - May 2010
Executive SummaryToday's highly mobile workforce is placing new demands on IT teams when it comes to protecting laptop data. To guard this corporate data at all times, companies can follow a number of data protection and encryption best practices, especially related to how encryption keys are managed. Incorporating these best practices into your IT organization can reduce data storage needs, get more out of your existing IT budgets and free your team to work on more value-added projects.
Protecting Laptop Data at All TimesProtecting your company's growing digital assets and complying with regulations is one of your top IT priorities. To do this, you are probably following the highest available encryption standards within your data center. You likely have a backup policy that you enforce to help maintain business continuity. And, as a server-centric organization, you may even have a policy that prohibits employees from keeping sensitive information on their laptops. After all, with a highly mobile workforce, some of your company's most critical data assets are on these laptops-at the edge of your network. However, end user-dependant policies can only do so much to protect data. If a data breach occurs at the edge, your customers, investors and fellow employees will be most concerned about the exposure, not comforted that you have reprimanded an employee for not following the data policy in place. Fortunately, there are a number of encryption best practices you can take to help project your company's laptop data at all times-at rest, in motion, during back up, and in restoration if a laptop is lost or stolen. This paper outlines !ve areas to consider in data protection, as well as best practices to ensure your data is as secure as it can possibly be. These !ve areas are:- Ensuring security for data at rest.- Facilitating security for data in motion.- Enabling security for backed up and restored data.- Pairing encryption with secure data deduplication.- Easing IT management and support.
© Copyright 2010 Datacastle. All Rights Reserved. 1Top Five Recommendations for Encrypting Laptop Data
Best Practices Guide - May 2010
Understanding the "Key" to Encryption Best PracticesBefore delving into the best practices, it's important to understand the process of encryption and the questions it brings up around key management. In its simplest de!nition, encryption uses an algorithm to convert data into an unreadable state, which can then be unlocked with a key and converted back into a readable state. Standards like the US government-approved 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) specify which algorithm to use and how keys should be generated. The output is a cryptographically random encryption key that can then be used to encrypt or decrypt the data when needed. As it turns out, encrypting data is relatively easy to do, especially now that encryption standards are being built into laptops and operating systems. However, key management-the way in which keys are generated, processed and managed-is signi!cantly more di"cult. For example, if you comply with the 256-bit AES standard, apply it to corporate data, and scale it across 100 or 1,000 or 100,000 employees, it can become exceedingly hard to manage the large number of cryptographically random encryption keys.Some prevailing market solutions have skirted this issue by taking a derived key approach. The most common option is to use a password, which translates into a 128-bit or 256-bit key that is used to encrypt and decrypt the data. This method relies on employees with laptops to remember the password, keep it private and change it at regular intervals per your IT policy. Unfortunately, passwords can also be easy to guess. Other Web-based market solutions take a stored key approach, keeping the key in a storage center to decrypt the data when you need it on the Web site. In this case, anyone who has access to the servers would have a copy of the key list to... [download for more]