Data privacy beyond encryption

As organizations across the globe migrate their data to the cloud, data privacy and security have become more or less synonymous with encryption — a technique that has remained the gold standard despite a rapidly changing technological landscape.

During the same time period, though, the prevalence and financial consequences of data breaches have skyrocketed, increasing 130% between 2006 and 2019 according to a 2019 IBM report. Meanwhile, the regulatory landscape has made compliance an ever-shifting target, with substantial fines for organizations that miss the mark.

Giving the rising threats and costs of poor data protection, it’s clear that modern organizations have a lot to gain from exploring new approaches to encryption — ones that avoid the pitfalls of legacy encryption approaches and do more to ensure data privacy and security.

Poised for cloud data security disruption

Today, less than half of enterprise data in the cloud has been encrypted. Unstructured data is growing especially fast, comprising 80 to 90% of the world's data today.

There are several factors that contribute to the lack of comprehensive implementation. First, traditional encryption tools are notorious for causing performance drag, which can be even harder to tolerate in the cloud where there is also latency to contend with. Encryption also adds significant complexity, friction, and management costs to compute infrastructure, applications, and workflow. Encryption key management is also more complex in the cloud, as organizations grapple with questions about whether to trust keys with third-party cloud providers.

The result is that many vulnerable datasets remain unencrypted at rest, including the unstructured data contained within PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheets, images, and more.

The ShardSecure platform provides a new way to eliminate data sensitivity, offering support for data security, privacy, and compliance with an innovative approach to file-level encryption. Our technology breaks data into tiny fragments or "microshards" that can be as small as single-digit bytes, mixes and pollutes those microshards with false data, and then distributes the microshards to multiple customer-owned storage locations to ensure total privacy. This approach prevents the unauthorized reconstruction of data, as attackers cannot obtain a full dataset without first compromising every customer storage location.

Augment or replace current encryption solutions

Organizations don’t need to choose between ShardSecure and traditional encryption solutions, as the ShardSecure platform can be layered with existing encryption tools for a defense-in-depth approach. ShardSecure supports interfaces like S3-compatible API for object storage, iSCSI for block storage, and SMB/NFS for file storage to integrate with any application, server, or other service leveraging cloud storage.

Since the ShardSecure platform acts as an abstraction layer, it can also consolidate all storage interfaces into one, even though each cloud provider may support a different data storage interface. This approach reduces the complexity of comprehensive data protection.

To learn more about how ShardSecure avoids the drawbacks of legacy encryption solutions, check out our resources on the topic.