Doing data security by exception

In case you are not familiar with those names, Decru and Neoscale both offer solutions to secure your storage infrastructure. How? Essentially using a better authentication scheme than just passwords, and various levels of fast, seamless data encryption.

Decru had this to say on the recent Choicepoint fiasco:

" ..we believe that the responsibility for data security belongs to the companies that house the data."

Difficult to disagree, but was that point really under debate? I probably don't know the facts well enough but don't remember Choicepoint denying its responsibility.

Also, in the Choicepoint episode data protection techniques such as encryption would probably not have made any difference.

However, data encryption helps if one of your media gets lost or is stolen. Take for instance the recent mysterious disappearance of those magnetic tapes at Bank of America.

So far there has been no indication of any disclosure, and I really don't know if those customer records were encrypted or not, but as a customer, I would feel a lot better knowing that they were.

Moving tapes to an outside vault, as Bank of America was doing, is a common daily activity in many data centers. If you haven't yet , could be worth adding another exception to your security checklist: "What if my tapes get lost?"

If the answer to that question is as unpleasant as a root canal, adding encryption could be the pain killer. And your customers would be grateful.