Why protecting encryption keys is critical to keeping cloud data private

The changing regulatory and compliance environment around data privacy necessitate improved methods of protecting sensitive information sent to the cloud.

Encryption is one strategy cloud service providers use to protect enterprise cloud data from cybercriminals and any unauthorized access.

Cloud Data Encryption mathematically transforms data so that it is undecipherable without the “key” that can be used to change the data back to its original form.

For a variety of reasons, enterprises often rely on their cloud service providers to maintain ownership and management of the keys, believing that cloud data encryption can only be accomplished in this way.

Quite frankly, it has become an issue of resource management for some enterprises, as summarized in this quote from a 2013 Gartner report: “Organizations have a limit to the amount of time that staff can dedicate to becoming experts in a given solution. Increasing the number of different vendor cryptographic solutions …