Encryption Can Save You from a Costly Data BreachData Encryption 

Did you know that just compromising 1,000 credit cards or social security numbers can cost your organization more than $200,000? That's a conservative estimate, according to the Ponemon Institute.

Beyond the significant costs, data breaches can cause:

  1. significant damage to a company’s brand and bottom line
  2. non-compliance with various state and federal data privacy regulations, including the new Massachusetts law, which mandate the protection of personal information.

Data Encryption a Requirement for all Businesses

Data encryption, which minimizes the likelihood of an information breach, has become a requirement for businesses of all sizes. It ensures that information is secure and protected, even if it falls into the wrong hands.

Given various state and federal regulations governing data privacy, and the attendant expense and reputational damage that a data breach causes, it’s clear that data encryption is not only beneficial, but absolutely critical.

Data encryption should be implemented across your organization in three critical areas:

What is Encryption?

The concept behind data encryption is quite simple -- make the data illegible for everyone except those who are authorized to access it. Essentially an algorithm is used to scramble the data in such a way that it’s readable only to those who have a key to decrypt the encrypted information. Organizations can achieve complete data security and privacy by using encryption for disk drives, email encryption and mobile/ removable device encryption.
  • disk encryption 
  • email encryption
  • mobile device and removable device (e.g., USB) encryption

Benefits of Data Encryption 

Why should organizations adopt data encryption? There are three main reasons:

  1. Compliance with data privacy laws. To ensure the security of personal information and the confidentiality of sensitive corporate information
  2. Reputation preservation. To retain the confidence of your existing customers, suppliers and partners, and to avoid tarnishing your brand with prospects.
  3. Cost savings. To prevent the inevitable expense of a data breach, which can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per incident.

Why Aren't More Organizations Doing Encryption? 

If data encryption is so critical, then why haven’t more organizations implemented it? There are two main reasons that organizations have been slow to adopt encryption: they don't have the expertise and they believe it requires a change in culture.

Doing data encryption yourself can add to management complexity and can be expensive to deploy at scale. It may also require users to consciously make decisions about what to encrypt and what not to encrypt – decisions which are better managed by policy, not by individual behavior.

Benefits of Encryption-as-a-Service

Data encryption as a fully managed service moves the technology burden to experts who live and breathe it every day. These experts serve as partners not only for the implementation, but also for maintenance and ongoing service and support. With encryption as a service, you'll enjoy all three benefits of data encryption -- compliance with data privacy regulations, reputation preservation, and cost savings -- and obtain five additional benefits:

1. Easy deployment - Uses your existing infrastructure, without the need for capital expenditures on additional hardware, which minimizes upfront costs and enables accelerated deployment.
2. Easy management – Neither IT staff nor management need to become experts on encryption. Eliminates the IT administrative burden of management and maintenance.
3. Ease of Use– Users don’t need any training; encryption is completely transparent to them. All they need is their Windows password for the pre-boot authentication.
4. Easy service and support – Access to expert resources 24x7. Service from a fully-trained, highly experienced team of technical experts.
5. Easy monthly fees -- Utilizes your existing infrastructure, without the need for capital expenditures on additional hardware, thus minimizing upfront costs. One predictable monthly fee.

The bottom line is that a fully-managed service for encryption is easier, more convenient and less expensive than doing it inhouse.

For More Information on Data Encryption

mindSHIFT encryption services -- including full disk encryption -- are available as a complement to mindSHIFT’s comprehensive suite of managed IT service offerings, as are laptop theft recovery and data deletion services.

For more information on managed encryption services, contact mindSHIFT or call 877-227-5054.

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