What is Bring Your Own Key (BYOK)?
While cloud computing offers many advantages, a major disadvantage has been security, because data physically resides with the cloud service provider (CSP) and out of the direct control of the owner of the data. For enterprises that elect to use encryption to protect their data, securing their encryption keys is of paramount importance.
Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) is an encryption key management system that allows enterprises to encrypt their data and retain control and management of their encryption keys. However, some BYOK plans upload the encryption keys to the CSP infrastructure. In these cases, the enterprise has once again forfeited control of its keys.
A best-practice solution to this "Bring Your Own Key" problem is for the enterprise to generate strong keys in a tamper-resistant hardware security module (HSM) and control the secure export of its keys to the cloud, thereby strengthening its key management practices.
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