Thursday, 24 May 2007

Cisco, RSA Team Up in Effort to Encrypt Network Data

Cisco and RSA have decided to join hands to develop security technology that aims to provide encryption keys for data at rest first and networked storage media. Both the companies said that they would combine Cisco's MDS 9000 Storage Media Encryption (SME) and RSA's Key Manager technologies.

Rajeev Bhardwaj, director of product management at Cisco said that the tools developed by the joint effort of both the companies would launch later this year.

"If I want to bring encryption into a SAN [via an appliance], I have to attach the appliance, and I have to rewire the SAN and change zoning so the appliance can talk to a tape library or disk," said Bhardwaj. "From our perspective, with encryption as a service, you install the line card, and with the flip of a switch, you say, 'This backup server encrypts this tape.'"

Bhardwaj also quelled fears that the encryption technology will not cause storage performance degradation.