Decru recently unveiled client software that gives customers even finer-grain control over who can access what. With the software option, applications are crypto-signed so customers can specify, for example, that only user seven of Oracle 10g is allowed to access credit card data in LUN 12 and only between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. While that might be an extreme example, recent events show a growing need to at least encrypt critical stored data.
Bank of America recently confirmed it lost back-up data tapes that contained information about a federal government credit card program while they were en route to a disaster-recovery site. And last summer an AOL employee stole 92 million e-mail addresses and sold them to a spammer.
These and other recent events are pointing up the need for another layer of security: storage encryption. So we decided to check in with Decru, a company targeting this vulnerability that we first ran into at the Storage Networking World Conference in 2002 .
Decru sells a security appliance called the DataFort, which essentially sits in front of storage devices – direct-access, networked-attached, or tape – and encrypts everything at wirespeed as it is being written.
Business is booming, says Dan Avida, president and CEO. The company is private and doesn’t release financials, but Avida says sales are growing 70% quarter over quarter and his customer base is approaching 100.
Decru has had early success with government accounts and now is seeing a lot of activity in financial services, healthcare and high tech. The company just signed a deal with Boeing Credit Union, which will use the DataFort to encrypt all back-up tapes sent off-site, Avida says.
Vice President of Marketing Kevin Brown says last year sales cycles were six months and customers were buying two to four units to pilot with a given application. Today, early customers are back for dozens more units, and sales cycles are often as short as three weeks.
DataForts are being used to protect everything from credit card data to healthcare information, corporate earnings and salary data. Software developers and Hollywood studios have installed them to safeguard their crown jewels – their intellectual property, Avida says.
Brown says that storage networks mean ever larger populations have access to stored records, and many companies still underestimate who has access to data. “What about the guy called in to service a disk drive? It might simply be a circuit board fix and suddenly he has access to all that data.”
Decru recently unveiled client software that gives customers even finer-grain control over who can access what. With the software option, applications are crypto-signed so customers can specify, for example, that only user seven of Oracle 10g is allowed to access credit card data in LUN 12 and only between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m., Brown says.
While that might be an extreme example, recent events show a growing need to at least encrypt critical stored data.
