New security and especially cloud security companies are popping up quicker than ever. My Google alerts seem to highlight a new entrance to the industry or an IPO to the capital markets every week. The plethora of cyber security companies are starting to cloud people’s perception. With this, prospective new customers often ask questions about “Why Crypteron?” and I want to make it clear with this blog post. No two security companies are alike. We have three clear distinctions that clearly separate us from other data security providers: quality, performance, and cost.
Quality: What do I mean by quality? I’m talking about the level of security you receive and the level of compliance you can satisfy. When we first started architecting our security solution, Sid and I discussed our strategy in order to capture the entire compliance market. We set out to exceed the highest level of security so that we would satisfy all the compliance standards in the regulatory landscape. We set our own bar for security that involved security features in addition to the utilizing of AES 256 bit encryption in GCM mode, implementing our encryption using NSA suite B framework, leveraging Elliptic Curve Cryptography at 521 bits and creating a proprietary key rotation scheme. With this, we also managed to exceed compliance for FIPS-140-2, PCI DSS, HIPAA & HITECH, CJIS, EU Data Protection, and the list goes on.
Our solutions at Crypteron are FIPS-140-2 certified; meaning that they comply with the strict guidelines that US government agencies must follow. Our security is so strong that the NSA permits its usage to secure “Top Secret” government documents. In addition, Crypteron’s solutions manage to mitigate the top six database attacks according to Dark Reading, but we will leave that for another blog post.
Some of our competitors claim to achieve this level of security but frankly they do not. You can read more about this in a Wired article and be the judge. Our security engineers have found vulnerabilities beyond the ones in this article, but I’ll leave that topic for another day.
Many data encryption providers utilize a gateway solution to secure sensitive data. This means that your sensitive data flows to another company’s systems to be encrypted and decrypted. There are additional security vulnerabilities presented when this approach is utilized, in addition to the performance and flexibility issues caused by gateways. Our solutions sit within your application and do not need data to flow outside of your environment to be secured. This also ensures that ONLY you have possession of your encryption keys and no one else.
Performance: As I talked about earlier, many data encryption solution providers use external gateways or expensive appliances, requiring data to make an additional pit-stop outside your application to be encrypted. In addition to unencrypted data having to leave the application to be processed, it also puts your application at odd with other ones vying for the gateway’s resources. This dramatically increases latency and limits scalability. Since our solutions sit within the application framework, data does not leave your environment and resources automatically scale to data requests. We have benchmarked our security solution CipherDBTM and it only adds less than 0.5ms latency/record, which is best in class for the level of security that we provide.
In addition, we are currently the only encryption provider that allows you to secure the data which you deem to be sensitive, down to the column level without the encryption keys ever leaving your application. Within our solution, you can label the data that is sensitive; leaving non-sensitive data alone. This means that we provide you an extra level of flexibility in addition to increasing the performance of your application. All other data encryption companies provide an all-or-nothing approach to security. Meaning that they secure all of the data in the database or none of it, requiring you to have to architect and build different databases to separate sensitive and non-sensitive data. This will require you to change your application’s data framework and make numerous code changes to the application, ultimately adding more costs to securing your application.
Cost: I’m talking about total cost of ownership not just the cost of the solution. There are a lot of hidden expenses when implementing a new security technology. With Crypteron’s security solution we do not require expensive appliances to run our security software, we do not require you to use our 3rd party gateway infrastructure, and we do not require you to hire extra staff to maintain it. Like I have said, one of our main advantages is that Crypteron uses software only approach, allowing us to secure data in the most adverse of environments, including the public cloud. That’s right; we can make your application compliant on Windows Azure, EC2, or any other cloud for that matter. Exposing your company to the economic viability of the cloud as an alternative to building out your own datacenter and upgrading older equipment, can be huge savings.
Maintenance is almost nonexistent with Crypteron’s CipherDBTM and CipherStorTM. Our customers have reported an average integration time of just two hours! After that initial integration, the security framework is mostly self-managed. Our self-scaling design means we automatically scale as your application itself scales up (or out). If you add additional servers, CPU or memory to your application, our security framework also benefits from it. There are no external bottlenecks you have to worry about. Even something as complex as encryption key rollovers, take just a few seconds of the security officer’s time. Once Crypteron’s security framework sees this indication, it automatically and opportunistically takes care of the rest of the migration process without additional human intervention.
Competitors require a lot of hidden engineering resources to re-map data, standardize data, re-architect applications, and change data flows to satisfy their solution’s complex requirements. More importantly, maintenance for our competitors is far more involved as you now have a completely separate appliance whose health and integrity must be continuously monitored.
The savings our customers express are significant, usually a quarter to a fifth the cost of the competition. All the additional expenses from competitor solutions add up (additional hardware, developer resources, and dedicated support staff). In addition, Crypteron enables companies and even governments to utilize the cost effectiveness of cloud infrastructure.
In summary: I hope I have left you with a sense that not all security companies are alike and there are varying degrees of quality, performance, and cost you can expect. For Crypteron, we pride ourselves on having the best military grade security solutions on the market, which is why some departments of our government use it. Our solutions are fast because we approached our solution from the software perspective, and do not utilize expensive hardware or gateways that drive up latency and constrain resources. Crypteron save organizations a lot of capital and operating expense by not requiring additional support staff, hardware or 3rd party infrastructure, and integration developers. In addition, we enable potential huge savings by allowing the use any cloud. If you do not believe me, try our security products FREE and sign up for a 30-day trail. You have nothing to lose and a lot to gain from our cost effective protection of your sensitive data.
