Why Is Data Storage Encryption Important

Ever since there has been valuable information there has been someone trying to access it.

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Encryption is the process of encoding a message so that it can only be read by the sender and the intended recipient. When electronic data is encrypted it is converted into another form called cipher text, which cannot be easily understood by anyone except authorized parties. The main role of encryption is to be able to safely store data in your computer or send a message through a network and protect the confidentiality of the information. Plaintext

An algorithm is a process or set of rules to be followed in calculation or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer. One of the algorithms for encrypting information is called the symmetric-key or single key algorithm. It has this name because both, the encrypting and decrypting process are mirror opposites of each other. This method requires both, the receiver and the sender to have the same encryption key. Since both of them have the encryption key, they can write their plaintext and translate cipher text and whoever needs to read the cipher text can just use the encryption key to translate the cipher text to readable plaintext. Another type of encryption method is the public key or asymmetric algorithm requires two separate keys, one secret and the other public. Even though they are different, they have a common mathematical connection. In this method, the public key is used to encrypt the plaint text into cipher text and the private key is used to decrypt the cipher text to plain

This means that as the information is loaded or saved it is being decrypted or encrypted. Any piece of hardware with the correct key can read entire volumes of encrypted information by immediately decrypting it. Without the key hardware it will be impossible for it to read the encrypted information. In order for this process to be completely transparent to the user the computer needs the use of device drivers that activate the encryption process. Any type of information that is encrypted as it is written and decrypted as it is read is on-the-fly encryption.

One of the characteristics of hardware encryption is that, unlike disk encryption software, it is always running and completely transparent to the user. As normal, the user must provide their password on boot-up to access the operating system. One of the features is that when the computer/laptop is turned off the data-at-rest protection is activated creating a key and encrypting all the data in the disk. In order to access this drive it is required to provide an authentication code of up to 32 bytes (2^256 or 2 kilobits, where kilo =