Online Education Provider Secures Customer Data With PKWARE
Background
A fast-growing provider of online education had just signed a contract with a significant new client, and now it had a significant new obligation to meet: encrypting its data. The new client required AES-256 encryption for data at rest, something the content provider had not implemented previously. The company had a short timeframe to find an encryption solution for its SQL database in order to meet its contractual obligation.
Challenges
As it evaluated its options for encrypting data at rest, the education company recognized that data protection was likely to become a concern for more of its customers in the future. The company determined that it should implement stronger protection for data throughout the organization, in order to build trust with customers who were concerned about data breaches and new regulations like GDPR. This meant finding a solution that could protect data on user desktops as well as in the company’s database. While most of the company’s employees were based in the US, its database was maintained by a separate team offshore. The company needed a solution that was easy to implement for both user groups, and could be managed from a central point of control while meeting all of its requirements:
- Providing AES-256 encryption for customer data in a SQL database to ensure contractual compliance
- Protecting sensitive data on employee desktops to improve security and maintain compliance with internal mandates
- Maintaining high performance on user devices and servers by minimizing the resources needed for encryption and decryption
Use Cases
PKWARE’s platform was the first potential solution that the education provider’s team evaluated. Unlike other data security products that address only a limited number of use cases, PKWARE is a true data protection platform, combining data discovery, classification, and encryption in a single workflow. The company determined that Smartcrypt was the only product that offered the capabilities it needed in order to meet its goals:
- PKWARE TDE provided a simple solution that would allow the company to meet its contractual obligation for encrypting data at rest.
- PKWARE agents on user desktops provided enhanced protection for customer data and other forms of sensitive information that employees created and used.
- PKWARE Data Discovery enabled the company to scan devices for sensitive data and apply its data protection policies automatically.
- With PKWARE, data encrypted on the company’s desktop systems remains protected even when copied or shared outside the organization.
- The PKWARE Enterprise Manager control panel provided a simple interface through which administrators could define and apply the company’s security policies.
The company selected PKWARE as its vendor and moved forward with implementation.
Results
PKWARE allowed the education provider to meet its customer obligations and internal data protection goals on schedule. The company installed PKWARE TDE for its SQL database and installed PKWARE agents on employees’ desktops and laptop systems.
Having seen the value of organization-wide data protection, together with PKWARE’s ease of deployment and ease of use, the company immediately made plans to protect data on 40 additional servers and expand its PKWARE implementation even further.
