Federal Cloud Ruling Forces Encryption Key Control Issue

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

Concerns over privacy and data governance in the cloud have reached a new level in the wake of a Federal court ruling requiring Microsoft to turn data over to the U.S. government that it has been storing for customers in a data center located in Ireland. Because Microsoft is incorporated in the United States, Federal Judge Loretta A. Preska ruled that the U.S. government still has the power to compel Microsoft to turn over data regardless of where it is physically stored. In the wake of recent court rulings, cloud service providers (CSP) had been storing data outside of the United States on behalf of customers that did not want that data to subject to U.S. jurisdiction. The ruling by Judge Preska is clearly a blow to cloud service providers based in the United States that are trying to compete in what has become a global cloud computing market.

But as disturbing as this latest Federal ruling is to cloud service providers, it may prove to be a boon to providers of encryption technologies. IT organizations have long-resisted the use of encryption because it has been difficult to manage and created a lot of processing overhead. But the federal ruling makes it clear that the only way IT organizations can retain control over their data is if they retain control over keys used to encrypt their data…

At the moment, many IT organizations rely on (CSPs) to encrypt their data. But relying on the CSP to encrypt data means they retain control over the encryption keys. As the CEO of Vaultive, a provider of encryption software, Elad Yoren said this latest Federal ruling will force the encryption key control issue in the cloud…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-services-providers/080414federal-cloud-ruling-forces-encryption-key-control-issue