Krishna Ksheerabdhi | VP, Product Marketing
A Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Thales found that CipherTrust Data Security Platform offered excellent quantified and unquantified benefits to the organizations investing in our solution. According to the survey findings, an organization may experience benefits adding up to a combined ROI of 221%.
To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed representatives from organizations with experience in implementing the CipherTrust Platform. For this study, Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite set.
The challenges of implementing encryption and key management
The effectiveness and security of encrypting data at rest and in transit are closely related to how organizations establish encryption and manage the respective cryptographic keys. Many organizations use a variety of legacy and point solutions to implement encryption and key management.
These solutions are often not scalable and cannot provide sufficient protection across data loads running on-premises and in the cloud. It is often very tedious and difficult to manage and integrate disparate tools and point solutions, requiring significant investment in person-hours and development effort.
As a result, organizations struggle with everyday challenges, such as:
- Keeping up with compliance requirements
- Not having a holistic approach to data security and encryption to include data discovery and classification
Consequently, organizations are looking for a solution that could provide capabilities such as:
- Configurable and fully integrated support for the entire value chain of encryption, from discovery and classification to protection and governance
- Flexible deployment, offering protection regardless of the workload location (on-premises or cloud)
- Reduced security and compliance-related overheads
The benefits of investing in Thales CipherTrust platform
Following the investment in the CipherTrust Platform, the interviewed organizations were able to optimize and centralize their encryption and key management activities, reduce the impact of a breach, and lower their cost of custom development and tooling. Additionally, the interviewees improved their ability to meet compliance regulations and the flexibility to scale up and protect assets both on-premises and in cloud environments with negligible depreciation of performance.
More specifically, the study findings demonstrated the following three-year, risk-adjusted present value quantified benefits:
1. Improved operational efficiency worth $1.6 million
The organizations benefited from significant operational savings through a reduction in encryption and key management effort by 70%. This reduction is mainly due to a high degree of automation and centralization of key management through the CipherTrust Platform. The organization can reallocate its staff's productivity into other value-added services.
2. Reduced impact of a data breach with an associated benefit of nearly $5.6 million
The CipherTrust Platform substantially reduced the potential impact of a data breach since the sensitive data stored is now useless to attackers due to encryption or tokenization. “Within weeks of implementing the CipherTrust Platform we have been able to discover and protect over 900 data sources representing over 50% of our data estate. We have also been able to achieve 100% centralization of key management. This means in the event of a breach, we reduce our exposure and can proactively identify potential security gaps,” reported the Head of Enterprise Key Management & Cryptography at a large bank.
3. Reduced development cost resulting in nearly $850k in savings
The CipherTrust Platform comes with pre-built connectors and integrations with a host of commonly used IT software and technologies. As a result, the interviewed organizations didn’t have to build multiple custom interfaces and connectors to other platforms and software components.
4. Avoided tooling and storage costs worth over $992k
The CipherTrust Platform provides an integrated set of solutions that covers the entire value chain of data protection, from data discovery and classification to encryption and key management. The interviewed organizations highlighted how the investment in CipherTrust has saved them from having to invest in multiple point solutions and third-party tools to achieve the same level of protection. With CipherTrust encryption, there is a negligible increment in storage size, as seen in other solutions post-encryption which results in avoided incremental costs.
In addition to the quantified benefits, the interviewed organizations reported that they encountered nonquantified benefits, including:
- Increased ability to meet compliance regulations like GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, PCI DSS and HIPAA.
- Flexibility to scale up and protect assets both on-premises and in the cloud.
- A high level of automation and encryption of data without any noticeable depreciation in the performance.
Consequently, following the interviews and the financial analysis, Forrester found that the organizations experienced total benefits of $9.1M over three years versus costs of $2.8M, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $6.26M and an ROI of 221%.
If you also want to experience the same benefits with Thales Next Generation Enterprise Key Management.
You can download the full Forrester Total Economic Impact™ of Thales CipherTrust Data Security Platform report now.