Excerpt from the eBook "2016 Encryption Key Management: Industry Perspectives and Trends."

Encryption and key management should move from an IT project to an integrated and seamless part of the IT infrastructure. Organizations need to be able to deploy encryption with ready-to-use infrastructure so that encryption ceases to be a barrier. In order to accomplish this encryption and key management solutions must be embedded in the IT infrastructure and enabled by policy. Key management solutions must implement the automation infrastructure that enables this type of deployment. All aspects of the provisioning of an encryption key server from network configuration, system logging, user administration, generation and distribution of credentials, key mirroring, backup and restore, and encryption key management must become API driven through standard web services.

Unfortunately, standards bodies and vendors have been slow to address this critical aspect of key management. While there is some movement to de ne some aspects of encryption key management through web services or add-on solutions like Chef, the net- work and services aspects of key managers have not been adequately addressed. This will continue to make it difficult to move key management into the realm of seamless and invisible critical infrastructure.

Take Aways

• Ask your key management vendor how they implement APIs for server configuration, deployment and management.
• Understand the key management vendor’s road- map and plans for key management automation.
• Ask the key management vendor for examples of customers using their Web services features.
• Understand any vendor licensing restrictions for installing management utilities.

There is No Single Source for Best of Breed Security

Understandably, customers long for a single vendor who can solve all of their security needs. Currently the process of deploying best of breed security involves working with multiple vendors whose products do not interoperate. It means spending a lot of IT resources managing a large variety of vendor products and services. While there are a handful of larger vendors attempting to provide a complete set of products, their marketing language does not match reality and there is no indication that it will for some time to come. 

Looking ahead, organizations should expect to work with a number of security vendors in order to deploy best of breed security for their sensitive data. It is unlikely that this will change in the near future. Smart organizations will identify best of breed applications that are easy to use, and make the resource investments needed to acquire and manage these solutions.

Take Aways

• Always try to deploy the best of breed security solutions and understand that this means dealing with multiple vendors.
• Prioritize your security needs according to risk, and tackle the highest priority items first.
• Understand and empower your IT organizations to acquire and deploy the best solutions. It is always more cost effective to prevent a problem than remediate it after the fact.