Network-management environments are getting tighter integration with document-encryption tools to help organisations surmount the traditional difficulties of at-rest data encryption that have kept them from implementing the data-protection technology in the past, according to one proponent of the technology.
The decision to certify document encryption technology from WinMagic for integration with LANDESK's network management environment represented the company's efforts to normalise the use of encryption technologies and encryption key management within complex networked environments, manager of sales engineering Andrew Souter told CSO Australia in the wake of the company's announcement that WinMagic had been certified for integrating into those environments.
Despite being universally recognised as important for protecting data on mobile devices and in the cloud, encryption “is too hard for end users to either embrace or to get set up,” Souter explained.
“You do get a lot of products out there but when you log in and it asks you to set up encryption keys and so on, that's still quite obtrusive. A lot of people won't do it, or will try to get around it. And while a lot of customers tell us it's something they want to do, they just haven't had a solution that they feel is capable of rolling it out.”
Integrating the encryption capabilities into LANDESK's network-management environment allows network administrators to enforce data-encryption policies on managed devices as part of the overall device-management paradigm.
Encryption and encryption keys are managed remotely, freeing users from the bother of having to manage or even think about encryption being in place.
“It's good for the IT team and also good for the user,” Souter said. “As long as users don't see the effects and it doesn't take 10 minutes to log in, and it doesn't add a delay when you're trying to browse things on your network, users will be OK with that.”
The gap between encryption's promise and implementation has been a regular feature of the technology, with one survey recently finding encryption adoption had slowed even as users believed the use of encryption freed them from reporting data breaches.
Another survey found that just 15 percent of respondents were using encryption in cloud-services deployments, although many were looking at it for future use. Difficulties in key management have consistently been pegged as the reason that many users are hesitating in embracing encryption more enthusiastically, with many early adopters likely compromising the efficacy of their encryption due to poor key management.
Some government authorities are on a campaign against the use of encryption while some experts believe encryption isn't worth the hassle. Even security-minded vendors have an inconsistent history around encryption technology, with Google recently deciding to shelve default encryption on new devices running its Lollipop version of Android.
This article is brought to you by Enex TestLab, content directors for CSO Australia.
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