Encryption has too long been overlooked

Kevin Percy says customer organisations don't take enough care when it comes to encrypting their data

Much of the IT market has become commoditised, and dominated, by the larger distributors. Increasingly, these distributors leave little or no room in their portfolios for new and innovative technologies. This isn't good for small resellers, who often do really well with innovative new tech.

Market demand for encryption technology is definitely on the increase. In the area I look at for technology developments, human error is still one of the biggest causes of data leakage, and as a result I would say there is still a lot of education needed on encryption.

Legislation and regulatory requirements are also driving demand for encryption, especially in the public sector.

Encryption should be part of every organisation's security strategy. There is a job for resellers and vendors to educate, evangelise and demonstrate the benefits.

Organisations often believe they don't really need encryption because employees don't have access to certain parts of the network. Confidential or highly sensitive information of any nature should always be encrypted, as you have no idea from where a threat may come.

Once encryption is active, it won't have any impact on day-to-day operations. Like anti-virus, encryption runs in the background. I think many people fear being locked out of important documents because they can't remember the encryption key, but in reality this doesn't happen.

The individual files and the hard disk drive are encrypted just once and the user has his or her own key, so it is highly unlikely this would create a problem.

We are beginning to witness more adoption. Organisations don't want to compromise on security.

Many of the so-called 'all-in-one' security products from some of the larger technology vendors have encryption bundled in. More often than not though, this bundled encryption isn't as functionally rich as pure-play encryption products and doesn't fulfil the organisation's security needs.

With web filtering, firewalls, back up, anti-virus and encryption all bundled together in one product, the encryption part of the equation can be very basic. IT managers then don't use the encryption technology because it doesn't deliver what they need.

If they prefer to use a more functionally rich encryption product, they then have to convince their organisation to let them spend on an additional product – when management believes it already has one.

A poor all-in-one product may cost more in the long run. Replacing technology means the customer could end up paying for it twice.

As more and more organisations turn to mobile devices and laptops, the risk of data leakage will only increase. The way to get around this problem is to encrypt the data.

Kevin Percy is UK business development director at DESlock