Secure data with cloud-based encryption

Porticor introduced its Virtual Private Data (Porticor VPD) system, a solution combining data encryption with patented key management to protect critical data in public, private and hybrid cloud environments.

Until today, the requirements for securing company and customer private data stored in the cloud were not fully met, due to the issue of keys stored in the cloud not being addressed. Now, enterprises can leverage Porticor’s homomorphic split-key encryption technology to ensure the privacy of data stored in the cloud, and benefit from the industry’s only cloud data protection system that delivers data security across virtual disks, databases, distributed storage and file systems.

The Porticor VPD system is made up of the Porticor Virtual Appliance and the Porticor Virtual Key Management Service, delivering the industry’s highest level of data privacy in a public environment for data protection and compliance to regulations such as SOX, HIPAA, PCI DDS and GLBA, while also solving the issues raised by EU Data Protection and the U.S. Patriot Act.

Using a unique, patent-pending technology, Porticor enables IaaS and PaaS cloud users to create a secured environment within minutes while completely eliminating the need to trust a security vendor or cloud provider with their encryption keys, therefore solving the biggest challenge for data encryption in the cloud – storing the keys.

Unlike traditional data security solutions which require costly software licenses and operational overhead, Porticor is a virtual appliance that requires no encryption or key management experience to encrypt customers’ entire data layer with the proven AES 256-bit encryption algorithm within minutes.

Unlike today’s cloud encryption solutions which put customers’ encryption keys in the hands of the security vendor or cloud providers, Porticor’s patented Virtual Key Management service, with breakthrough split-key encryption technology, and built for homomorphic key encryption, will uniquely keep the encryption key in the customer’s control, delivering a trusted cloud-based key management system.

With Porticor’s VDP each data object, such as a disk or file, is encrypted with a unique key which is split in two: a master key and a specific key. The master key is common to all data objects of one application, and remains the sole possession of the application owner and is unknown to Porticor; while the second specific key is different for each data object and is stored by the Porticor Virtual Key Management Service.

As the application accesses the data store, Porticor uses both parts of the key to dynamically encrypt and decrypt the data. When the master key is in the cloud, it will be homomorphically encrypted – even when in use – and can never be seen in the cloud.