CipherCloud Offers Data Encryption for Amazon Web Services

Cloud security vendor CipherCloud announced a new product designed to bring its data encryption technology to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

With CipherCloud for Amazon Web Services, CipherCloud is taking aim at those seeking to protect data on the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon’s Redshift data warehousing service. According to CipherCloud, the technology automatically encrypting sensitive information on a field-by-field basis before it goes to the cloud and works with any JDBC-compliant database running on AWS infrastructure.

“Organizations in the public and private sectors are increasingly tapping the cost efficiencies and elasticity of the cloud to meet data storage and collaboration needs,” Pravin Kothari, founder and CEO of CipherCloud, said in a statement. “At the same time, privacy regulations around the world require strong data security and compliance to protect sensitive information from hacks, accidental leaks and surveillance. CipherCloud now makes it easy to add strong encryption to any data going to the cloud, without modifying code, or disabling cloud functionality.”

CipherCloud’s offering is built on AES 256-bit encryption and preserves functionality such as searching and sorting of encrypted fields as well as the format of database fields and the length of encrypted data strings. There is a range of encryption options available, including options for dates, phone numbers, decimal numbers, timestamps, email addresses or structured number strings such as credit cards. The technology also allows organizations to apply security policies on a per-field or per-word basis so that users can customize their approach to data protection.

Customers can also integrate other cloud applications for abilities such as offloading file storage into AWS environments to dramatically reduce costs and avoid storage limitations, according to CipherCloud.

“When combined with access controls through applications, [database encryption] can prevent access by administrators or unauthorized users,” Gartner analysts Brian Lowans and Eric Ouellet wrote in a report entitled ‘Develop a Storage Encryption Strategy From the Vault to the Cloud‘. “This can be used to protect data fields while in use. This also protects files against loss or theft of the media.”