ORLANDO, FL - EMC World - May 23, 2007 - Extending their strategic alliance, Cisco® (NASDAQ: CSCO) and RSA, The Security Division of EMC (NYSE: EMC), today announced they are working together to develop technology that will help customers improve and simplify the encryption of confidential information - such as medical records, social security and credit card numbers. Together, these technologies will help customers encrypt data-at-rest on tapes and other types of storage media and manage the associated encryption keys within the storage area network infrastructure, a process that is less invasive, more secure and easier to manage.
The planned Cisco and RSA technology will include Cisco Storage Media Encryption (SME), which provides encryption of data-at-rest as a fabric service, and RSA® Key Manager, a centralized solution for encryption key lifecycle management. Together, they will provide mutual customers with a highly secure, scaleable technology capable of managing both encrypted media and their keys. This Storage Media Encryption technology will help enable customers to meet various regulatory and privacy requirements by helping to ensure that confidential information is not compromised if a storage tape or disk is lost or stolen. The impending technology will also support an open API (application programming interface) for key management, giving customers the flexibility to deploy stored, encrypted data solutions that best meet their operational needs.
"Security threats are no longer confined to companies with backup tapes stored at an off-site facility. Now companies of all sizes are exploring encryption because of the real threat of losing data or having it stolen," said Rajeev Bhardwaj, director of product management, Data Center Business Unit at Cisco. "By combining RSA's enterprise encryption key management with Cisco high performance Storage Media Encryption technology, we are providing our mutual customers a simpler way to protect data stored across the storage area network."
"RSA and Cisco are working together to simplify the deployment and management of encryption in the storage area network fabric, which will greatly reduce the complexity and disruption that businesses are struggling with today," said Dennis Hoffman, vice president and general manager for Data Security and Chief Strategy Officer at RSA. "RSA is committed to protecting information wherever it lives, and we are pleased to be adding Cisco's SME to a growing list of data encryption solutions which are centrally and comprehensively managed by RSA Key Manager."
Cisco will integrate Storage Media Encryption into Cisco-based storage area network (SAN) fabrics to offer seamless management of data encryption across multiple types of storage devices, such as disks, tapes drives, and virtual tape libraries. By encrypting data in the network fabric, customers can secure data on media that lack native encryption capabilities, such as legacy tapes and disks. By using the Cisco SAN fabric, customers can eliminate the need to manage separate stand alone encryption appliances. Cisco SME technology will be non-intrusive and work seamlessly with existing backup applications.
RSA Key Manager is built to simplify the deployment, management and operation of enterprise encryption. A critical component in any distributed encryption infrastructure, RSA Key Manager is designed to generate, store and broker access to cryptographic keys securely, and manages their complete lifecycle. Built on a robust, fault-tolerant architecture, it is engineered to enable centralized, secure and simplified administration for all encryption end-points, and to ensure separation of duties for access control. Its policy-driven design enables security teams to define encryption policies in a central system, and have those policies implemented across a distributed set of encryption end-points - taking the complexity out of distributed key lifecycle management.
