Cloud cryptography is a new solution that facilitates the secure management of information in financial services remotely, where your company’s information, sensitive data and payment ecosystem are safeguarded through algorithms and the most secure protocols in the industry.
In the case of local encryption, the management of the information and the keys that protect it are in charge of your organization, generating a higher cost of acquisition of external boxes and their maintenance; in the cloud, or in the virtualization of the HSM (Hardware Security Module) this process is carried out in remote servers and a complete infrastructure of technological attention provided by a supplier, delivering a managed service of easy access and allowing organizations to have a better ROI regarding the secure management of their payment ecosystems.
Challenges to be met with data encryption in the cloud
- Ensuring interoperability between systems: systems used remotely and with third parties must be compatible with the algorithms used, in order to successfully share and transport information.
- Optimal performance of systems: being digital, it can consume a lot of additional software resources, affecting performance. It is important to anticipate and balance the loads.
- Reliance on a good cloud service provider: this ensures the implementation of appropriate methods and algorithms for the proper provision of this resource in your company.
- Data Recovery: Recovering encryption keys can become a titanic or even impossible task. A backup prevents the loss of your information and that of your customers.
- Key management in payment environments with large volumes of data and customers: Protecting large amounts of information requires a proper key management process that allows you to generate keys, store them securely and distribute them accordingly.
Given these challenges and benefits, which encryption model should you choose for your company? This decision depends on several factors to be compared:
CLOUD DATA ENCRYPTION VS. LOCAL DATA ENCRYPTION
Cloud data encryption:
Scalability: handling large volumes of data is easier with more robust software that does not require additional hardware investments
Convenience: eliminates complex company processes such as manual encryption on your local system.
Access from any location and device: your data is protected in any scenario, facilitating borderless access to authorized users.
Lower cost and burden of maintenance and upgrades: you can free yourself from managing and maintaining your own servers, which translates into lower costs.
Local data encryption:
Total control of the process: managing your information and the keys that protect it allows you to apply your own policies.
Less dependence on third parties: without vendors you have greater independence which can mean fewer security breaches.
Zero exposure: the information, your most important asset, is not stored or transits through digital environments avoiding overexposure.
Regulatory and specific certifications: in some cases, companies must comply with specific regulatory requirements with greater control of data, therefore, managing your encryption locally can help.
In payment environments and the financial sector at large, data encryption in the cloud may be the best of the options, considering the current context and the need to protect and, at the same time, make the information flow between systems to carry out complex transactions without security flaws, ensuring the integrity of data and customers.
While seeking to streamline the integration process of Cryptography as a Service, at CLAI PAYMENTS® Technologies we have worked on a solution that adapts to each of the cryptographic services that financial companies need, in a flexible way and with a complete operation in the cloud that complies with the highest international standards such as PCI and GDPR.
Currently, this experience and the offer of unique features such as integrated key management, consumption of several services in a single request, key coordination between nodes – inter alia – allows us to have more than 800 effective cryptographic transactions per second, more than 300 types of cryptographic services available and more than 130 cryptographic sites integrated in production. Learn more about our cloud cryptography services and capabilities at www.clai.com
