Tokenization or Encryption Keeping You Up at Night?
Posted by Stuart Lisk on July 26, 2010
Are you losing sleep over whether to implement tokenization or full encryption as your cloud security methodology, lying awake wondering if you locked all the doors to your sensitive data? Your data security restlessness can be treated by analyzing your current situation and determining the level of coverage you need.
Keeping with our bedtime analogy, do you need a heavy blanket covering you from head to toe to keep you warm and cozy or perhaps just a special small blanket to keep your feet warm. Now extend this to your data security – do you need end-to-end encryption that blankets all of the data being processed or is a tokenization approach enough, with the blanket covering only the part of the data set that needs to be addressed.
There is so much hype in the industry making us believe we must choose one approach over the other. Instead of the analysts and security experts helping us make the decision, they have actually caused more confusion and sleepless nights.
As with anything involving choice, there are pros and cons for each approach. Tokenization provides greater flexibility, because you can select (and thereby limit) the data needing to be protected, such as credit card numbers. However, in order to do this successfully, you must be able to identify the specific data to encrypt, which means you must have intimate knowledge of your data profile. Are you confident you can identify every piece of sensitive data within your data set? If not, encryption may be a better strategy.
Full, end-to-end encryption secures all the data regardless of its makeup, from one end of the process through to the destination. This “full” protection leaves no chance of missing data that should be protected. However, it could also be overkill or, potentially hurt performance.
While there is much being said in the market about performance, this should not be a deal breaker, and optimization technologies and methodologies can minimize the performance difference. It also depends on whether security is the highest priority. In a recent survey we did on cloud security, more than 77% of the respondents said they were willing to sacrifice some level of performance in order to ensure data security. The reality is full encryption performance is acceptable for most of implementations.
Also, you do not need to choose one over the other. As with the cloud overall, many companies are adopting a hybrid approach when it comes to data security in the cloud. Think of it as using the full comforter to keep the body warm, but also utilizing the foot blanket to provide extra warmth to your feet when needed.
Tags: Cloud Computing, Cloud Integration Platform, Cloud Security, Data Encryption, tokenization
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