Debunking the Top 10 Myths About Encryption

Debunking the Top 10 Myths About Encryption

Misconceptions about encryption persist, including that it will degrade your system’s performance. Here we debunk 10 myths about using encryption to secure critical data.

Myth: Encryption Will Degrade My System’s Performance

True, encryption requires computing cycles, but most hardware platforms now have dedicated resources to accelerate encryption and eliminate any system-performance degradation.

Myth: Encryption Terminology Is Too Hard to Understand

Encryption solutions are built on industry-standard, strong encryption. There’s no need to completely understand key length, hash codes or algorithms to deploy encryption solutions.

Myth: Managing All Those Encryption Keys Is a Nightmare

If you had to do this it might be a nightmare, but fortunately good encryption solutions do the hard work and make key management a simple task.

Myth: It’s Easy to Lose My Encryption Keys

It’s easy to lose your car keys. Encryption keys are protected and stored securely to prevent this. Encryption keys are protected using Hardware Security Modules (HSM) built for encryption processes and standards, such as FIPS-140.

Myth: Encryption Is Hard to Deploy

Actually no knowledge of complex math or algorithms is needed. Most solutions deploy quickly with the complexities of encryption and key management abstracted.

Myth: Encryption Only Secures the Application

Encryption can secure the information, the data and the entire workload and provide tremendous flexibility for what gets encrypted.

Myth: Rotating Encryption Keys Means Application Downtime

It’s a best practice and required for many regulations, but it doesn’t mean downtime for all platforms. Rotating an encryption key requires decrypting and then encrypting with the new key, usually requiring downtime. Many solutions can do the rekeying operation in the background, which requires no downtime to perform a rekey or rotate the encryption keys.

Myth: Enterprise-Grade Encryption Is Expensive

The cost of entry for encryption is zero for many platforms and inexpensive for the protection received. Some cloud providers and host platforms already provide encryption as part of the platform (such as Bitlocker or AWS encryption). The return on investment for encryption is significant if you consider that you can alleviate the need to do breach notification if the breached data was encrypted, or that cyber-risk insurance premiums may be lower if your data is encrypted.

Myth: Encryption in the Cloud Isn’t Secure

Encryption in the cloud is no less secure than in your data center, especially if you manage your keys outside the cloud provider.

Myth: Encryption Solutions Don’t Work Across All Platforms

New-gen encryption solutions are not only available for any mobile device (Apple/Samsung), server (Bitlocker/Linux) or cloud service (Azure, AWS, vCloud Air), but can work across different platforms. This is because the solution is built with cross-platform key management and encryption in mind.