Companies have a fiduciary responsibility to protect their customers' most private data, and that has become quite a challenge judging from the headlines. Serious data security breaches have resulted from a multitude of spectacular failures – everything from sloppy handling to cyber crime.

The federal government is now exploring legislation to enforce adequate data protection measures to ensure the confidentiality of important data. However, the options have been very limited for companies seeking to comply. Software encryption can reduce performance to a crawl and bloat the size of data, adding to the overhead of getting it securely backed up. Other hardware-based options are exorbitantly expensive. Now, Cybernetics has just released our newest, third generation hardware encryption option. Data is compressed before it is encrypted so the required tape capacity is actually decreased, typically by a factor of two to one.

The entire process of compressing and encrypting is handled in a high performance encryption offload engine so there is no negative impact on processing speed. The integrated compression feature improves speed as well as capacity. Key management is based on encryption tokens, which allow physical control and easy visual audit. The user data is encrypted using the very secure AES algorithm with a truly random AES session key. Reading an encrypted tape requires the use of a token listed in the integrated distribution list. The virtual erase feature wipes a tape such that there is no possibility of getting to the data once it has served its useful purpose.