Last week we hosted a webinar titled “Encryption Key Management with Microsoft SQL Server 2008” and had excellent attendance!  The webinar covered meeting encryption key management compliance requirements on Microsoft SQL Server.  Patrick Townsend, Founder and CTO, discussed how our new hardware security module (HSM) is simplifying how organizations are meeting compliance requirements and how it removes cost as a barrier for a professional encryption key management solution. 

During the webinar we received some excellent questions that we would like to share.  As always, let us know if we can answer any further questions!

What are the performance impacts of encryption?

That’s a great question.  Encryption has a reputation for being very demanding from a performance point of view.  It doesn’t have to be that way.  We know from our own practice that encryption can be optimized and very efficient.  In the Microsoft SQL Server EKM environment, especially if you are using TDE, the SQL Server itself is doing the encryption of the entire table space and the encryption key manager is providing the vault and protection of the encryption keys.  Microsoft will tell you that TDE will impose about a 2-4% performance impact on your applications.  I think that is relatively accurate.  We have done our own testing with TDE and we come in closer to a 2% impact, and in some cases we come in even less.  Of course, you have to have the usual caveats.  Your applications and the size of your database may show you different results in terms of performance, but I think those are good numbers for guidance.  So, encryption is a pretty small impact on overall application environment for the protection that it provides.

Does your Enterprise Edition of Alliance Key Manager serve encryption keys to Oracle databases as well?

Yes!  We have customers today that are protecting data in Oracle databases using key retrieval libraries that we provide.  The same is true for MySQL, DB2, and other databases.  We provide a wide set of libraries to help customers protect data in any database.

How do you price your encryption key management for SQL Server solution?

The product is based on the number of key managers.  Depending on what customers need in the way of production and development environments, we provide a set of pricing plans to help them get into the technology in a very cost effective way.  If you would like formal pricing, let us know and we would be happy to schedule a call and see how we can meet your needs.

We are very focused on cost-effective solutions for our Microsoft mid-market customers.  We know that everyone’s resources are constrained these days.  We are philosophically committed to helping customers with cost-effective and FIPS-certified encryption key management solutions.

View our webinar "Encryption Key Management with Microsoft SQL Server" to learn more about utilizing Microsoft’s Extensible Key Management (EKM) interface in SQL Server 2008.