By Ravi Srivatsav, CEO of DataKrypto
If you are a business leader, you are probably operating under the false belief that your data is safe. Well, let me tell you straight up: It isn’t.
Data is the organization’s crown jewel in the digital landscape, embodying valuable and sensitive information crucial to its operations, success, and competitive edge. Protecting this data in all forms, including text, video, web activity logs, and audio, and across its lifecycle is paramount to establishing a solid risk posture. Breaches are about far more than monetary loss or regulatory fines. The damage cuts deeper, slicing into a company’s reputation and credibility, destabilizing its operations, and shaking the trust of its customers to the core.
Yet, despite investing millions in vast security infrastructures, companies remain vulnerable. The United States alone saw an alarming 20% spike in data breaches in the first nine months of 2023 compared to all of 2022, according to the report “The Continued Threat to Personal Data: Key Factors Behind” by Dr. Stuart E. Madnick, Founding Director of Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan. The same trend is hitting businesses around the world.
The cold, hard truth? Security systems are outdated and riddled with blind spots so glaring that cybercriminals are walking right through them—undetected. In particular, current encryption solutions, often assumed to provide continuous data protection, simply don’t. Continuous encryption is needed, which is made possible through Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).
How Gaps in Encryption Leave You Exposed
Traditional encryption provides valuable protection, but many companies implement such solutions without fully understanding their limitations and gaining a false sense of security. This type of encryption broadly protects data in transit and data at rest, leaving gaps in protection when data is in use or moving between stages in the lifecycle (e.g., in use, at rest, or in analysis). When data is encrypted, it’s secure. But when data is in use, it must be decrypted. Your data is exposed in these instances—a vulnerability sophisticated hackers understand and routinely exploit.
Your data is only as secure as your weakest link, and right now, missing links in encryption are creating dangerous security gaps.
The Blind Spots You Can’t Afford to Ignore
Other methods of protecting data, such as tokenization and data anonymization, are designed to cover the gaps that traditional encryption leaves exposed. These approaches are suitable for specific use case scenarios but do not assure data security throughout its lifecycle.
Another tool commonly used is data loss prevention (DLP), which is complex to implement and maintain. Their sole purpose is monitoring and controlling data usage, which they do well, but not full-scale, end-to-end protection. DLP primarily focuses on data at rest and in transit but doesn’t protect against unauthorized access, including insider threats. DLP also slows operations quite significantly.
Confidential computing is another data protection method designed to ensure that sensitive information remains confidential when it is actively used by applications, often in untrusted environments. The technology creates a secure enclave or trusted environment to safeguard against data breaches, relying on hardware mechanisms ensuring only authorized codes can access the data. Confidential computing is challenging to implement and has inherent performance overheads, given its complex hardware and integration requirements. More importantly, secure enclaves don’t allow you to operate on encrypted data. And they are not infallible. They can be breached.
Data access controls and monitoring solutions are necessary but inadequate to address today’s attacks. For example, access controls lack granularity in permissions. They often can’t enforce dynamic access control policies, enabling users to acquire sensitive data beyond what is permissible and to an excessive degree. Monitoring tools face their limitations, such as limiting access to only IT users, creating data silos, and hindering cross-team collaboration.
Insider threats also pose significant challenges. For instance, customer records in a bank are encrypted to protect them against an outside attack. Still, insiders with elevated privileges could import and misuse the data, putting the bank at risk of insider threats.
Continuous Encryption: The Only Way Forward
Today, there is an elegant solution to the problem. Thorough data protection requires data to be encrypted during its entire lifecycle, in all stages and states, while still usable. What businesses need is continuous encryption. Enter fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), a game-changing technology often considered the holy grail of data protection because of its potential to provide constant, consistent data protection. It allows encrypted data to be processed without ever decrypting it, and data remains protected at every stage of its lifecycle–collection, storage backup, archival, retention, and disposal. It can protect your data from even the most sophisticated threats, closing the dangerous gaps left by data-in-transit and data-at-rest encryption.
However, not all offerings are the same. Many promote features and capabilities at the cost of speed and scale, which are far inferior to what a true FHE solution can deliver. My guidance is buyer beware. Be sure to look for FHE that performs at the speed of clear text, no matter what data type it encrypts.
FHE may not be a viable option because its practical implementation has traditionally been hindered by excessive computational costs (i.e., processing time) and performance and scalability limitations. That is now changing, thanks to a new breed of FHE that performs at nearly the same speed as data in the clear–the speed of digital, making it performant and massively scalable. The latest breakthroughs have made continuously encrypting data a viable, scalable solution for businesses, so you no longer have to choose between security and utility. You get both.
The Time for Action is Now
If your business isn’t continuously encrypting data, you have encryption gaps. Period. Businesses invest millions in various workarounds, but each lacks critical capabilities and leaves data vulnerable. The digital landscape has evolved, and so must your approach to safeguarding your most valuable assets. New advances make fully homomorphic encryption – FHE – the key to a new era of data security that doesn’t compromise performance for protection.
The blind spots in your data security are real and can be costly. Every day you delay addressing them, you invite breaches and leaks that could bring your organization to its knees. It’s time to wake up, face the threat head-on, and embrace the advanced encryption technologies that will genuinely secure your future.
