HP Acquires Voltage Security to Encrypt Data

Listen Up CIOs and CISOs: Are You Ready for What’s Coming?

As part of an effort to broaden the reach of its security portfolio, Hewlett-Packard this week announced the acquisition of Voltage Security, a provider of encryption software for a wide variety of databases.

Albert Biketi, vice president and general manager for HP Atalla security business unit, says that as part of a defense in depth approach to IT security, HP is extending its portfolio of security offerings to include software that encrypts data in addition to being able to enable IT organizations to secure their network perimeters.

While defending the perimeter is still important, the fact is that as malware gets more sophisticated, IT organizations also need to encrypt data on the assumption that malware will penetrate their first line of defenses at the network perimeter.

Biketi says that Voltage Security not only encrypts data stored in traditional SQL databases, it also can work with NoSQL databases and Hadoop. As the multitude of data sources continues to expand across the enterprise, Biketi also notes that Voltage Security makes a nice complement to the HP Enterprise Secure Key Manager software the company already offers.

Although Biketi says that HP has not committed to offering Voltage Security products as a cloud service just yet, the company hasn’t ruled out delivering some kind of data security service that leverages Voltage Security encryption software.

Given the fact that encryption is becoming easier to manage and the amount of compute horsepower required to support it is becoming more plentiful, Biketi says there really isn’t much reason to not employ encryption more broadly. Not every piece of data may need to be encrypted, but given the increased sophistication of digital criminals, it’s a lot better to be safer now than definitely sorry later.