Cisco and RSA have announced that the two companies are to work together to develop encryption technology for Storage Area Networks. It is hoped that the technology will improve the performance of data protection by carrying out encryption within the San fabric itself.
The planned products will also include Cisco's Storage Media Encryption technology, which encrypts data within a San fabric and RSA Key Manager, which manages encryption key lifecycles.
"Security threats are no longer confined to companies with backup tapes stored at an off-site facility. Now companies of all sizes are exploring encryption because of the real threat of losing data or having it stolen," said Rajeev Bhardwaj, director of product management, Data Centre Business Unit at Cisco.
He said that the combination of the two products will provide customers with a simpler way of protecting data in a San.
Cisco will integrate Storage Media Encryption into Cisco-based San fabrics, which it said would offer management of data encryption across multiple types of storage devices, such as disks, tapes drives, and virtual tape libraries. It said that encrypting data within the fabric extended security to media that lacked native encryption, such as legacy tapes and disks.
Dennis Hoffman, chief strategy officer at RSA said that the collaboration with Cisco would "greatly reduce the complexity and disruption that businesses are struggling with today."
