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Mozy, the first cloud-based file backup service acquired by EMC in 2007 and now property of Dell EMC, has been a survivor in the storage wars during the last 10 years. It started out as Berkeley Data Systems with about 50 people in American Fork, Utah, to provide a consumer-based service that morphed and scaled into a first-class business-level service after the acquisition.
Now the company with 70,000 paying enterprise customers is branching out in its data security, announcing new support Aug. 1 for the Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP).
KMIP enables the automatic generation of per-user encryption keys that can be managed via an on-premises key management server (KMS). Mozy’s support for KMIP is timely because there is a general trend in enterprise IT toward the centralized management of encryption keys across multiple applications using a KMS.
Mozy already offers three encryption key options:
- Mozy default encryption key: Mozy assigns an encryption key to your users. This key is stored and managed by Mozy for the most seamless experience.
- Personal encryption key: The user enters a passphrase that is used to create the encryption key. Each user manually creates a unique personal encryption key.
- Corporate encryption key: The administrator enters a passphrase that is used to create the encryption key. Your Mozy admin can create a key for all users in the company or a unique one for each user group.
By supporting KMIP in its security arsenal, Mozy offers a fourth data encryption method. Enterprises prefer that applications using encryption keys be KMIP-compliant so they can be managed via a KMS. KMS provides a secure, single point of encryption key management across multiple systems.
KMIP ensures the privacy of data, the company said. An advantage of KMS for Mozy customers is that it enables backup admins to easily create and manage per-user local encryption keys. This provides finer encryption granularity (that is, increased at-rest data security) than a corporate encryption key while retaining its on-premises advantages.
KMIP is now available for the MozyEnterprise service at no additional cost. KMIP is currently supported on the Windows platform with Mac integration is coming soon, the company said. On the KMS front, KMIP is currently supported on SafeNet’s KeySecure KMS.
