Did you hear? Ebay was among the latest of companies being compromised by hackers. Who exactly are these hackers? Hackers are essentially anyone with malicious intent on causing disruption or harm to a system, application or its data. I think the word “hacker” has received a bad rap over the years. Hacking can actually be a good thing. By definition, the “act” of hacking is merely to reverse engineer an application or system with the intent to improve it. There are college courses dedicated to Ethical Hacking as well as certification levels. To be certified to “hack” for the greater good sounds almost paradoxical. I think if you asked most people if ethical hacking was possible, most people will say no. With data being compromised almost daily, companies have taken serious measures safeguard their data through encryption.

Encryption is the purposeful implementation of scrambling the data only to be de-scrambled by the unique digital encryption key. With data ever growing exponentially, over the years, companies have bought into storage saving technologies such as Deduplication and compression. This is to better manage and protect (backup and restoration). To summarize, Deduplication is the process in which duplicated data blocks within a system is not written over and over again. In essence, a single instance in place of many instances. For example, if a company stores a food menu that is 5MB that has been distributed to 1,000 employees, it would consume 5GB of disk storage total. In a deduplicated system, it would only consume 5MB of space, regardless of how many employees. That is because the system sees 1 instance of this menu and will reference the 1,000 instances to this 1 instance. With compression added, this single instance of a 5MB menu can potentially be reduced up to 20x more. Imagine this process over terabytes of data. A tremendous space saving across the enterprise.

With security becoming a top priority with companies already employing deduplication and compression, what implications will encrypting data have on these datasets? The answer is: MAJOR.

Encryption randomizes data where duplication is purposely eliminated. Compression is limited, if at all applicable. Almost counter productive. So what are companies doing? Welcome to the Information Data Management balancing act. This balancing act is, by nature, an enabler to make better tools, to innovate new technologies and to do more with less. As budgets are shrinking with systems becoming more complex, it is exceedingly important to have proper training to maintain these systems. As many do properly train and do it well, but there are some who cut corners. Those companies do themselves an injustice and put their data at risk. Those companies usually fall usually in catastrophic fashion.

The Targets store data breach that happened back in 2013, is still trying to quantify the damages from that event to this day. Uncovering more and more damages as the investigation deepens. It is important to not fortify the front door while leaving the back door wide open.