How Encryption Works In Online Backup Systems

April 17, 2009

By Patrick Jobin, StoragePipe Solutions

Since the beginning of time, armies and rulers have relied heavily on stealth means of transmitting information from one point to another. Today the need for secrecy has extended down to the masses, and they’ve developed tools to help with this process. As a result, encryption technology is now easier and more accessible than ever before. 

Recently, there have been more and more media reports of sensitive customer data being exposed due to data breached. This has brought mainstream attention to the mounting need for data protection and encryption. In fact, U.S. government reported in 2007 that 71% of companies used encryption when transmitting their data.

This is especially true of online backup.

One of the main areas of concern when it comes to online backup solutions has to do with the “trust factor” of placing your sensitive corporate data on someone else’s computer systems. The best way to get around this is to make sure you’re using a solution with a strong set of encryption features.

First, you’ll want a solution that encrypts the data from your end, before transmitting it to the remote backup site. Ideally, you’ll want something that uses 128-bit AES encryption.

AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) is a standard that was adopted by the United States government, and has been heavily researched and analyzed. In 2003, the US Government gave official permission for AES encryption to be used to protect classified information. And if AES is good enough for classified government documents, it will also do a good job on your data.

Second, you’ll want to make sure that your AES-encrypted data is transmitted to the secure off-site storage location using an encrypted connection such as SSL.

SSL is the acronym for “Secure Socket Layer”. Although today, it’s more commonly known as Transport Layer Security.

Quite simply, SSL or TLS is a protocol for transmitting information across a network in such a way that it prevents tampering, message forgery, eavesdropping and other potentially malicious attacks. This technology is so secure that it’s currently being used by many financial institutions such as MasterCard, Visa and American Express.

Of course, even with SSL and AES encryption, your data will only be secure if your data remains encrypted on the remote backup server.

Unfortunately, some low-end backup providers will decrypt your data in order to perform compression and data deduplication that saves space on their servers. Of course, when your data gets decrypted on their end, it’s no longer as secure as it used to be.

For this reason, it’s important that your select an online backup and recovery provider that allows you to create your own secret encryption password. This should be a password that’s only known by you, and isn’t stored by your backup provider. This way, you know that nobody else will ever be able to access your data.

Just to summarize: If you’re looking for a secure online backup solution, make sure that your provider encrypts your data twice using AES and SSL encryption, and that they allow you to protect your critical data using a secret backup encryption password that’s only known by  the end-user.

With the tips outlined in this online backup encryption article, you should be able to select an online data backup provider that will reliably protect your confidential data.  

About Storagepipe:

Storagepipe Solutions provides secure online backup and recovery solutions that protect your data using strong SSL and AES encryption. Storagepipe also gives customers the ability to store their data using a secret encryption password that’s only known by the end-user.