Storage Encryption for Financial Services
“Must Have” Security for the Financial Industry
Government Mandates Reach Unprecedented Levels
Financial institutions are under pressure to do more with less, even as the flood of tracking and reporting requirements from government mandates reaches unprecedented levels. The financial sector is reeling from waves of regulations – from the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) and Sarbanes-Oxley to PCI and Basel II – that steadily increase operational complexity and the cost of doing business.
Already spending valuable time and resources to protect sensitive data, financial institutions are now faced with new challenges presented by the latest round of legislation such as the California Database Breach Notification Act (SB 1386), which requires companies to publicly disclose security risks and subsequent actions taken, even if they so much as suspect a security breach.
Under Pressure
The new legislation, likely to soon expand to national and international boundaries, significantly increases the odds of negative publicity, which in turn undermines customer trust and erodes brand integrity. Because financial enterprises stake their business on these factors, they are obliged to focus on a new line of defense – for stored data – that must be guarded against insider attacks, disgruntled employees, unprincipled contractors, and loss or theft during shipping and handling.
Consider that just one backup tape can easily store thousands of customer records. A lost tape can become, at best, a public relations nightmare – like that of a recent, well-publicized case of backup tapes lost while in-transit to offsite storage facilities. At worst, it can spark a wave of lost business: 30 percent of American and Canadian consumers now say they will close all accounts and move to another bank if their personal information is compromised. 1
Storage Encryption: the New Line of Defense
Because encryption security measures meet newly mandated requirements for both backup media and networked storage, Gartner has increased its forecast to project that "by the second quarter of 2006, 85 percent of large enterprises will initiate data-at-rest encryption projects in response to regulatory compliance or industry initiatives." 2
Gartner projects that 85 percent of large enterprises
will initiate data-at-rest encryption projects by
mid-2006.
By encrypting stored data, credit card merchants, retail and wholesale banks, credit unions, and insurance companies can significantly minimize the risk of internal or external security breaches. But it is only by implementing stored data encryption best practices – including centralized, enterprise-class encryption key management, access control, and authentication – that businesses can ensure overall security and the availability of encryption keys for reliable information recovery.
NeoScale Solutions – Seamless. Reliable. Secure.
NeoScale Systems, Inc., the industry leader in enterprise storage security, uniquely meets the financial
industry's new requirements with a range of storage security appliances that automate encryption of data headed to storage and decryption of data headed to applications. NeoScale solutions make stored data unreadable to unauthorized users. Because NeoScale CryptoStor® storage security appliances are purpose-built, they provide ubiquitous, immediate, and transparent protection of storage data regardless of application, transport, media type, or location – with virtually no latency delays and minimal impact on response time.
Protection without Crippling Complexities
Finance IT professionals are justifiably concerned about the complexities that encryption can impose on transaction processing performance and the storage infrastructure. NeoScale storage security appliances not only operate with nearly no impact to performance, they automate and simplify the procedures required to meet compliance regulations.
NeoScale enables financial institutions to securely automate the transfer and recovery of information from primary and/or secondary storage and minimizes operational complexity at the lowest possible cost. Easy to deploy, CryptoStor enterprise-class solutions offer high-speed security that can selectively compress, encrypt, and authenticate data.
NeoScale Customers Save Costs Across the Board
With NeoScale solutions, top financial institutions save costs across the board by steering clear of negative headlines, avoiding fees for compliance failures, and decreasing risk and liability.
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