Back in the mid 70s, the use of encryption in enterprises was pretty much unheard of. Soon companies started to introduce some encryption in limited instances, such as encoders on communication lines to encrypt financial transactions.
A major breakthrough in the 90s saw the rapid expansion of the use of encryption with the arrival of asymmetric key encryption. And asymmetric encryption gave birth to two technologies that are now found in every corner of the enterprise: SSH and SSL.

Critical company information and communications are protected by keys and certificates, and ineffective management of keys and certificates is the single biggest reason why companies experience data security breaches. And this applies not just too symmetric keys, but to all cryptographic keys, including private keys, asymmetric keys SSH keys, and certificates.

Symmetric key technology is still widely used today for the protection of data at rest, and SSH and SSL are the de-factor standards for data in motion. In the case of symmetric key encryption there are no de-facto standards with the result that most storage vendors such as IBM, HP, EMC, etc., provide proprietary solutions.

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