Ashvin Kamaraju | Vice President of Engineering, Strategy & Innovation
By generating real-time insights, analytics is changing how we conduct business. Providing a fast and adaptable platform for real-time business, SAP HANA is a clear leader. The magnitude of the SAP ecosystem and the number of enterprise customers that depend on SAP to run their business speaks to the strength of the company’s solution.
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There are three major trends playing out in the industry:
- Real-time data analytics
- Cloud computing
- The increasing number of regulatory requirements for data protection
Mix cloud computing with data analytics and you have game-changing capabilities for business computing. Yet despite its obvious benefits, many have been hesitant to make the transition to the cloud. Security concerns are causing many organizations to pause on deploying mission-critical applications in hosted cloud environments. Unfortunately, recent data breaches have done nothing to assuage fears.
To solve this ‘mission-critical’ ‘data in the cloud’ dilemma, Virtustream and SAP expanded their partnership in late August to protect SAP HANA in Cloud environments. With Virtustream (and Vormetric by extension), we have become part of a select group providing cloud infrastructure services for SAP business-critical applications. Customers can now deploy SAP software via SAP Enterprise Cloud, protecting customers from complexity while providing a secure and flexible cloud environment.
Integrating Vormetric’s solution into Virtustream’s cloud infrastructure allowed users to utilize a variety of security technologies. Virtustream’s vice president of operations and compliance says it best: “I was surprised to see that security vendors that provide encryption products for devices like desktops and laptops just can’t handle enterprise databases. During our research we found an SAP-endorsed solution from Vormetric that had been in production for several years; we decided to investigate further.”
This combined solution ensures companies can securely migrate applications to the cloud. Vormetric enables these customers to be the sole custodian of their encryption keys so that they always control users and applications that access data.
In typical SAP HANA implementations, encryption keys may be hosted and managed by IT maintenance staff. When hosted in the cloud, this means that the cloud provider has access to the encrypted storage of customers’ keys and data. Vormetric closes this security gap so providers can access the application and the infrastructure, but only the customer’s authorized users and security administrators can access the encryption keys, the data, and access policies. Providing strong security and compliance in any computing environment requires robust security at every level. Teaming up extends enterprise-class security and compliance, without sacrificing performance.
Think for a minute about what “the bad guys at the door” (or already inside your walls) are looking for – financial information, healthcare information (both of which directly translate to money on markets for stolen information) and critical IP. They are looking for data. It’s time to think about a change in security posture that adds better data protection, rather than paying lip service to compliance requirements.
In light of recent major breach news, encryption and data security should be top of mind. Enabling customers to become the custodians of encryption keys and access control policies ensures data is secure while complying with regulatory requirements.
Our goal is to give customers the tools they need to control their data, deny third-party administrators access to sensitive data and give customers the visibility they need for security and compliance. Vormetric is proud to be part of a team that develops innovative cloud solutions that improve security while performing at scale.