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Computerworld - Before the digitalization of data, encryption was enough to protect vital, private data from prying eyes and malicious intent.
However, as the recent rash of media coverage over the potential exposure of personal consumer data like Social Security numbers and credit card information demonstrated, storage security that depends only on encryption is far too risky. Hackers are able to eavesdrop, tamper and impersonate data increasingly invasively and effectively, and encryption alone is not enough.
To meet stringent compliance standards describing how long data must be kept and protected, companies must wage war against tampering and theft with a multilayered approach that starts with encryption and ends with the integration of digital signatures, digital certificates and hierarchical key management.
Backup and archive confront security challenges
The digitizing of critical information has eased transactions and made record keeping and other tasks more efficient, but it has also led to internal and external risks that threaten the privacy and authenticity of personal and other data. In recognition of these threats to the sanctity of critical data, regulations like the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and California's Database Security Breach Notification Act dictate the need to provide secure backup and nonrepudiated archiving.
The dangers that are driving these and other regulations are threefold:

1. Eavesdropping: The information remains intact, but its privacy is compromised.


2. Tampering: The information in transit is intercepted and changed, or changed at the destination.


3. Impersonation: The source information is spoofed (a fraudulent source pretends to be someone else), or a person or organization can misrepresent itself while accessing the data.

Many backup and archive products either transmit and store the data in clear text format or with a lightweight encryption algorithm. While sophisticated techniques are used to ensure that data stored on primary storage cannot be accessed by unauthorized persons, data stored on backup media (quite often removable media) can be freely accessed and restored by unauthorized persons.
Some hardware approaches to encryption emulate tape drives and encrypt all the data sent to tape. While better than clear text storage of data in place, these devices don't understand the business value of the data, therefore they will equally encrypt mission-critical databases with unimportant MP3 files.
Being unable to tell the difference between important and unimportant data for purposes of security is a risk in itself. With this approach, some vital information is likely to be underprotected, and an organization deploying such a blunt one-dimensional approach is unable to strategically allocate storage in the most effective manner.
A final shortcoming with most of today's backup and archive products