Protecting Private Data in Virtual Environments with New Encryption Approaches

The data center transformation to software-defined technologies started with virtualization of compute resources, and today has emerged to hyper-convergence of compute/storage.The use of encryption has been an important approach in protecting sensitive information both at rest in organizations and as it is transmitted. Now, new approaches allow encryption to be delivered as a service, suitable for cloud use, at the cloud scale.There are many challenges around protecting private data in virtual environments, and they include the fact that virtualized environments have many copies of the same data and leverage deduplication technologies for efficiency.Encryption performed in the virtual machine (VM) may reduce deduplication efficiency. In addition, some solutions perform encryption in the storage layer at the drive-level. While this protects against physical theft, it does not protect against a rogue administrator cloning a virtual machine.