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Encryption is Easy, But What About the Keys

With as much as 80% of the world’s digital data estimated to reside on removable and mobile storage media including PCs (85% of that being "unstructured data"), protecting data end-to-end across its lifecycle must be treated as more than managing an archival repository, for example. Enterprises are now making encryption part of their high-availability strategy for transmitted and stored data in the enterprise, across virtualized environments, with partners, and on mobile platforms.

Most believe that encrypting data, or using other data protection techniques, is easier than stopping its theft. While widespread use of advanced authentication and access control technologies like biometric security solutions remain to be fully accepted by the industry, encryption makes good sense, even with its given complexity.

However, encryption is worthless without secure key management. Encryption is the easy part, key management is another story. For encryption to succeed, the key management system must yield optimal benefits and transition encryption from a mediocre technology to a true information assurance necessity.

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