When you move into a new place, one of the first things you do is change all the locks. It’s important to your sense of security that you control who has access to your home. Changing the locks just makes logical and practical sense. This same logic should also be applied to your business thinking when you are looking to secure your sensitive information in a new environment or an environment you don’t fully control.  

To help ensure data security, the safest move is to encrypt everything, regardless of what the information is or whether you’re storing your data on premise, or in a cloud environment. At the end of the day, encrypting everything decreases human error in terms of mis-categorization of confidentiality, removes the requirement and effort to classify data into categories, or forgetting to encrypt a sensitive file by accident.

Let’s talk about cloud storage for a minute.

As more and more businesses move their data onto a cloud platform, it may be easy to assume that enough security already exists to satisfy business needs. Recently we teamed up with Spiceworks and commissioned a study looking at IT professional’s perceptions on cloud security. It’s really shocking when you learn that on average, 40% of the data stored in cloud infrastructure solutions is sensitive/proprietary, and less than half (49%) of all the sensitive data stored there is encrypted.

Only 11 % of IT professionals truly believe their data is completely secure on a public cloud environment, but a staggering 86% of companies either primarily or completely rely on their cloud infrastructure solution providers to secure their data. This disconnect illustrates a significant lag in the application of fundamental security practice – like encrypt to real world and current deployment choices.

Without the use of an enterprise controlled encryption solution, you may be unwittingly allowing unauthorized parties access to your information without you knowing it. Using the same analogy of your home front door lock, the only way for you as a business to ensure that you are the only one who has total access to your now virtual information is to change the locks and maintain control of those door keys.

With enterprise controlled encryption intelligent key management, you will be able to give different levels of permissions to certain users, computers, and locations to offset any potential miscues that allow data to fall into the wrong hands.  This coupled with an everything encryption strategy will allow your business to proactively secure your data, no matter where it’s stored. Just as importantly, you will be in complete control of your encryption keys and know exactly who is accessing your data, from where, and when.