Celebrating Data Privacy Day
More and more data is moving online. This is as true for an individual using the internet as it is for a company moving resources to the cloud. As the amount of data in transit and at rest has risen dramatically over the past decade, so has the issue of data privacy.
Data Privacy Day is our opportunity to reflect on this fact and consider the best ways to take action. It’s an international holiday occurring each year on January 28th. Celebrating Data Privacy Day is easy—we share data protection best practices and find ways to raise awareness.
In the spirit of Data Privacy Day, Futurex is eager to share some best practices for protecting sensitive information. Read on for some time-tested cryptographic techniques for maintaining data privacy year-round.
Data protection
Protecting data is one of the oldest uses of encryption. Today, organizations often use general-purpose encryption to secure their digital resources, like databases, applications, or files. If you want to rest easy knowing your sensitive data is safe, deploying a hardware security modules (HSM) to perform general-purpose encryption is the best way forward.
When you deploy a general-purpose HSM to enhance data privacy, it’s important to take compliance into consideration. That’s why Futurex HSMs are certified under strict compliance requirements like FIPS 140-2 Level 3 and PCI PTS HSM v3, which require both physical and logical security. This protects HSMs against physical intrusion attempts, further ensuring that your organization’s data is safe and sound. Best of all, HSMs that perform general-purpose encryption can be easily deployed on-premises or on-demand in the VirtuCrypt cloud service.
PKI and CA
To protect the privacy of devices and users on your organization’s network, you should consider implementing strong key management practices. One example of key management in action is public key infrastructure (PKI). PKI uses public key cryptography, where a public key encrypts and sends information and a private key decrypts it. These public-private key pairs are used in digital certificates, which are essential to maintaining trust across your network. PKI gives you a logical system for managing these digital certificates.
Digital certificates are credentials used to authenticate users, devices, websites, and other digital objects. They contain identifying information to prove that devices or users are trusted. Certificates are digitally signed and issued by a certificate authority (CA). Certificate authorities use digital certificates to provide users and machines with digital identity, allowing them to prove they are authorized to send or receive encrypted information throughout a secure network.
You can establish PKI and CA by deploying a key management solution either on-premises or in the cloud.
Keeping data private
It might be easy to take data privacy for granted. But that’s why we recognize Data Privacy Day each year, to turn our attention to this critical part of an organization’s security.
Every organization is different, but a few common strategies abide. Deploy a general-purpose HSM on-premises or in the cloud to encrypt data in transit or at rest; deploy a key management solution like PKI and CA to authenticate users and devices on a network; and simply be mindful of how you’re managing and protecting your most sensitive data.
If you’d like to learn more about how your organization can enhance data privacy, feel free to contact our subject matter experts or request a demo anytime.