Data Security Adds an Extra Layer of Protection

by Tait Hamiel
June 1, 2004

Preparing for Battle

As businesses extend their operations and data beyond traditional corporate and IT boundaries, the need to securely compress data becomes more compelling.

IT, security and data center managers must now determine the safety of their data:

• From being stolen, destroyed in a disaster, or otherwise compromised
• In the data center
• In corporate systems
• Representing intellectual property
• Reflecting executive communications.

Security officers faced with protecting digital assets have woven together a fabric of systems and technologies to help manage the risk and protect their corporate IT operations. The problem is too big and amorphous for a one-size-fits-all solution.

Data Security

Firewalls act as a protective perimeter to your IT assets, but they’re only one part of the security fabric. What happens when someone has breached your security wall? If you’re fortunate, there’s a virtual guard dog waiting to stop further access. Adding RACF, ACF2, or even Top Secret to the data processing environment is the first layer of protection for your mainframe. This is great as long as you don’t plan to move the data to other environments.

IT organizations spend tremendous time and effort protecting the network, configuring firewalls, isolating critical back-end processes, and keeping their servers running. However, the inevitable still happens. You probably know a company or someone who has fallen victim to a malicious attack, costing that company millions of dollars in production downtime. So, how can one prevent such an invasive, costly event? It’s a challenge, given the disparity of the platforms commonly deployed and the growing need to network with partners and ensure their systems use secure, effective technology.

The challenge is greater and more imminent for companies that fall under strict regulatory guidelines such as:

• Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (protecting the privacy of financial data)
• Healthcare Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which protects the privacy of patient information in the healthcare industry
• Sarbanes-Oxley (mandating efficient, financial reporting record-keeping among public companies).

Encryption

Data centers can save money by combining encryption and compression. Encryption usually increases the file size, making pure encryption security solutions infrastructure-intensive. But combining the two techniques yields significant file size reductions. Figure 3 shows an example of a document encrypted with a typical industrial-strength algorithm.