HP Simplifies Encryption Management

Reduce Risk: Six Vulnerable Points Enterprises Need to Consider

As part of an effort to redefine how encryption is managed across the enterprise, Hewlett-Packard today has unfurled a suite of HP Atalla offerings at the HP Discover 2014 conference.

Albert Biketi, general manager for Atalla within the HP Enterprise Security Products group, says the Atalla offering includes a cloud offering managed by HP that is specifically designed to make it easier and safer to apply encryption to data at rest and in motion, regardless of whether it resides on a mobile computing device, on premise or in the cloud.

The challenge that HP is trying to address is making it possible to apply encryption in a way that doesn’t affect the usability of any given application, while at the same time making sure the keys to unencrypt that data never get lost. To that end, HP Atalla makes use of a “half key” management model that requires two half keys to be fit together before a piece of data can actually be read.

By making it easier to apply encryption, HP is hoping organizations will more broadly adopt it. Most organizations don’t know where their most sensitive data is located at any given time. As such, Biketi says selectively encrypting certain types of data on certain devices only means that some other piece of critical data winds up being unencrypted.

The latest iteration of Atalla, says Biketi, is designed to make it possible to more consistently apply encryption in a way that leverages the internal security expertise of HP.

Ever since revelations of snooping by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) became an international sensation, interest in encryption has soared. The problem is that the primary reason most companies don’t make more use of encryption is that it’s difficult to manage. At the same time, HP notes that the average organization is dealing with about 122 successful security attacks per week. At that rate, encryption is clearly no longer optional.