What’s the Key to a More Secure and Efficient Data Center?

Cyber threats are all around us. The cost of data loss through inadequate methods of protection, along with more sophisticated hacking, has escalated to an even more serious level in the past few years. Organizations are dealing with several risks associated with securing data: from hacking and other brute-force attempts, to mounting compliancy concerns to address privacy mandated by internal policy and GDPR. It has become even more imperative for businesses to guard their data, on top of customer data and intellectual property (IP). But how do you secure your data in a manner that is not as intrusive and is more transparent?

The key elements of an effective data protection strategy include the enterprise hard drives in your data center, inside servers and dedicated storage. Without proper protection, the storage in these devices can be readily removed physically and forcefully hacked using many of the data retrieval methods available. Proper security methods require an extensive approach to assembling a data security strategy (also called data-at-rest) for enterprises.

To create an effective data-at-rest security approach, you need to know where your data is, what is its level of sensitivity and how it should be secured. You also need to know how your data moves within the organization, across multiple networks, to remote sites, or even into the cloud. The advent of key management systems has helped relieve many of the concerns associated with data-at-rest protection, while addressing the need to secure data across the business.

These systems reduce the risks of servers and/or hard drives potentially walking out of a secure or non-secure location, and then being unencrypted by a third-party, if keys are in the device being stolen. A central key manager helps you to create and manage keys in a secure manner, while encrypting hardware in your business. Key managers leverage and adhere to a variety of cryptography standards including FIPS and KMIP. Enterprise Key Managers store keys on a separate, highly available system to avoid keys being taken with devices, such as servers.

To further help with transparent, near real-time encryption, businesses can use self-encrypting drives, also known as SEDs, for their servers. With their built-in encryption feature, deploying SED drives helps secure data quickly. SED drives with a key management system, which helps encryption and decryption become more transparent and faster. Enterprise key management works to scale your data protection as you scale storage capacity across your data center.

Dell EMC is announcing new security capabilities to address data-at-rest protection requirements for businesses. The Dell EMC OpenManage Secure Enterprise Key Manager is embedded in Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and works in conjunction with leading Key Management Servers. Businesses can now scale-up to meet demanding data growth, while effectively maintaining secure keys for encryption across the enterprise. The solution is a primary component of Dell EMC OpenManage FlexSelect, providing integrated security features that enable cyber-resiliency across your server infrastructure.

Now you can readily scale up from one drive to many with a dedicated key management solution and meet global compliance security and privacy standards. Find more peace of mind, knowing that your business and customer data is secured anywhere in the world, whether inside or pulled out of a server, with the right key.

Learn more at dell.com/openmanage

Robert Hartman

About the Author: Robert Hartman

Robert Hartman is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and other products in the PowerEdge family. He has always had a fascination with technology and how it can add value to people, businesses and ongoing trends to improve productivity. His perspective is to communicate how customers and business can leverage, maximize their investments and increase their results. This is Robert’s second time with Dell Technologies following his passion in marketing, after joining in 2010 in the Networking business unit. He has over 20 years of marketing experience in semiconductors, networking, servers, and cloud, with many more years in technology.