SafeNet looks to secure data in the cloud

Encryption vendor SafeNet is now offering technologies that help enterprises securely store and access information held in third-party data centers.

Companies are increasing shifting their computing to vendor-hosted data centers, which poses new challenges for how information is stored, moved and accessed, said Peter Schill, SafeNet's director of channel sales, at Cebit on Wednesday.

Since company networks no longer have a traditional perimeter, the data itself must be controlled, he said.

"If you start to rent storage space here and computing power there, there is no control of who actually can access your data or manipulate your data," Schill said. "Cloud computing is not a threat to security. It can be solved if you have the right technologies in place."

SafeNet's strategy is to focus on access control and encryption. The technology in one of the new products -- intelligent authentication tokens -- comes from SafeNet's acquisition in January 2009 of Aladdin Knowledge Systems.

The tokens allow administrators to assign certain policies and access rights to different pieces of data, Schill said.

Another component is encryption. SafeNet has a hardware appliance that can manage the keys used to encrypt databases, applications and other information, Schill said. The appliance centralises encryption processing and performs other functions such as logging, auditing and policy administration.

SafeNet doesn't have a product name for the cryptographic key storage or the intelligent authentication tokens, but neither technology needs its own appliance. It can be bought as a so-called "virtual appliance" that can be installed on another server. SafeNet also sells hardware security modules.

SafeNet has many competitors in the areas of authentication tokens or encryption, but Schill said SafeNet has an edge as its central management and encryption system can be used with different databases such as IBM's DB2, Microsoft's SQL or Oracle products.