Companies stand to lose their reputation, not to mention business, in cases of severe data loss. One way to prevent the inadvertent leakage of information is to go in for encryption to secure data on hard drives, flash drives and the like. Subhankar Kundu looks at the different aspects of data encryption in the corporate world.
Businesses are striving to protect vital data from internal and external threats. Today, there are three sources from where the threats have been tracked namely malicious external attacks, malicious insiders and unplanned leakage on the part of insiders. The high volume of unstructured data flowing through the average enterprise defeats attempts at protecting data for the greater part.

Preventing data loss has become a primary focus of IT security today. A multitude of software and appliances are being deployed to address these issues. Although unauthorized intrusions have been hyped up CIOs today are equally if not more concerned about the inadvertent leakage of information from inside.

The industry needs to ponder upon how to deal with organizational insiders or which are the right applications or policies that can scrutinize the information being sent out of the network. This is the core of the immensely complex problem of data loss.

Industrial intelligence among highly competitive businesses often requires that extensive security measures be put into place and companies are taking a hard look at data encryption in this regard.

With an exponential rise in network traffic and content generation, selecting the right data encryption solution or hardware becomes imperative to be able to protect nearly anything. It also depends on the IT policies set by the CIOs that determine the extent to which content is monitored, scanned and sensitive data identified. Mitigating risk through encryption of outgoing messages and the restriction on the usage of external devices by employees is one way.

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