What You Should Know About Encryption
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Posted On :
May-04-2013
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Article Word Count :
684
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Data security has been on the rise in the past years. It is increasingly important to maintain protection over valuable digital information, given the prevalence of hacking and phishing.
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Data security has been on the rise in the past years. It is increasingly important to maintain protection over valuable digital information, given the prevalence of hacking and phishing. However, it is surprising that about 26% of organizations do not use data encryption to protect sensitive information in their databases. These are details such as employee information or a company’s financial secrets. Additionally, only 36% of these same organizations are confident that they won’t lose their data due to improper management of their encrypted data. Scary as it is, you’ll find that many people know very little about data encryption and its importance, so let’s try to remedy that.
What is Data Encryption?
Encryption is the process of encoding sensitive information in such a way that unauthorized people can’t intercept it. It has been used by the military and in governments to facilitate the sending of sensitive data. Storage area network or SAN encryption is also common among many institutions, especially those that usually have large amounts of data in a network. SAN encryption strengthens the network, as multiple ciphers/codes are used to protect sets of information.
Underneath encryption lies the science of cryptography, which is the field concerned with ciphers. These ciphers transpose letters or numbers which represent the encrypted information. In the computing world, these ciphers are termed as algorithms.
Algorithms provide a way of writing a piece of information and give a range of possible number/letter combinations which allow access to the encrypted information. A key is then used to determine a single possibility in a variety of combinations available.
Types and Functionality of Data Encryption Systems
Encryption systems are divided into two main types. These are: symmetric key and public key.
In the symmetric key encryption scheme, two computers share the same secret code/key. The Data Encryption Standard (DES) was the first major symmetric key encryption scheme to be widely used. It consisted of only 56-bit keys, and improving this system led to the birth of Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).
The AES consisted of 128-bit, 192-bit, and 256-bit keys, all of which are sufficient to provide tight security for today’s computers. Perhaps the only disadvantage of this encryption scheme is that two users must always rely on a secure way of communicating or an attacker can eavesdrop into the communication.
In contrast, some computer systems employ the public key system. In the public key encryption scheme, two separate keys are used. These are the public encryption and private decryption keys. During the transmission of data, your computer holds the private key, enabling only you to decrypt the data, and the public key is provided to anyone who wants access to your computer. This makes it easy for anyone to encrypt information, but nearly impossible for them to retrieve it later through decryption, since only you know the key.
The encryption speeds in any system also matter to a great extent, and this is evident in SAN encryption. High speeds of up to 90Gbps are required so that encryption won’t be a hindrance in the performance of a network.
Though encryption is all about protecting sensitive data about corporations, it has both benefits and disadvantages.
Pros of Data Encryption
- Zero data breaches – Encryption prevents data breaches, thus ensuring information protection.
- Encryption is on the data – Since the encryption is on the data itself, the data becomes secure regardless of where it is transmitted.
Cons of Data Encryption
- Costs – Securing data by encryption can be costly because the systems managing the data encryption must be powerful as well.
- Encryption keys – Loss of encryption keys means loss of all data. Additionally, the more the encryption keys, the harder it is to maintain all of them.
Now is the time to beef up your computer’s protection. Be it your personal computer or an entire system in the workplace, all saved information is important to someone and must be guarded. Data encryption can help you keep vital information secure.
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Article Source :
http://www.articleseen.com/Article_What You Should Know About Encryption_263886.aspx
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Author Resource :
The author has an immense knowledge on SAN encryption. Know more about SAN encryption related info in his website.
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Keywords :
SAN encryption, nexstara.com,
Category :
Computers
:
Computers
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