In today’s world of corporate data security, your keys are the key to your success.  Encryption keys, that is!  With the continued and growing challenges of protecting highly sensitive and critical data of your customers, students, employees, or any other demographic that entrusts data to you; enterprises are looking to the widespread use of encryption to tackle this monumental task.  Gone are the days when security teams were the only group thinking about how to implement encryption.  It now falls squarely on the organizations entire IT team.  The days of subject matter experts being the only ones to understand encryption are near extinct.   It’s with that one sentence that opens up a new void of understanding, and key management is at the center of that void.  Yes, there are still subject matter experts (SMEs) in our IT groups, like security, and they continue to be the torch bearers of encryption and key management.  However, we are now in a time that other teams must have advanced knowledge of encryption technologies as well.  Groups like storage, infrastructure, app dev, and cloud are still at best of average familiarity with encryption solutions.  Rooted in this lack of familiarity, and often overlooked, is the aspect of key management; not the encryption side of the coin.

As a security software vendor, when you have the chance to speak with these groups, you can imagine that the conversations most often wind up revolving around the “how”, “why” “when” and “what” of encryption.  As such, the first topic in this conversation is how to implement encryption, and key management (you can’t have one without the other or can you?).  Key management seems to pose the most significant challenge across an enterprise, especially across their broad virtualized estate.  Often this includes two or more different infrastructure implementations, such as, native cloud infrastructure and on-premises data centers, which nowadays, always include traditional hardware and hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), while also being highly virtualized.

The result of these conversations, is inevitable, the customer, prospect or business partner revealing they are struggling to manage their encryption keys in a uniformed, compliant and secure way.  The struggle is real and in part due to encryption vendors building key management services (KMS) for their solution that is often complicated and overly burdensome to manage.  If you can believe it, some solutions don’t offer a reliable approach to key management at all, and that’s if they even provide a key management server.  Although these conversations happen more often than they should; this lack of functionality creates a massive opportunity in the security market for solutions like HyTrust DataControl and KeyControlKeyControl is one of the only KMS solutions out there taking the approach of, deploying and managing a key management solution that needs to be easy to implement, use and maintain; while also providing robust capabilities around end-to-end key life-cycle management.

HyTrust KeyControl enjoys one of the most extensive KMIP partner integration lists in the industry as well as being a market leader in key management.  These integration partners include VMware vSAN & vSphere encryption, Pivot3 Acuity volume encryption, NetApp ONTAP, Dell Compellent Storage and our latest addition Nutanix AHV & vSphere encryption

So take a deep breath and a moment to take stock in all of the encryption solutions in your enterprise, then ask yourself if a market leading encryption and key management offering is missing?  If so HyTrust KeyControl is your solution because your keys are the key to a successful data security program!!!