How to keep data secure with encryption

We interact with encryption every day without even knowing it, whether we’re accessing our online banking service or messaging a friend on WhatsApp.

Without encryption, data would be much easier to access by cybercriminals, and in business, it’s vital to ensuring your most important information remains secure.

What is encryption?

At its most basic level, encryption is a process used by websites, messaging systems, smartphones and many more technological innovations for scrambling data to make it unreadable.

Decryption is the process of unscrambling that data to make it readable again, and requires a ‘key’ to be accessed (which, without password access, is near impossible to guess).

Encryption is typically used to protect confidential data and passwords. The process is instant from a user’s perspective, but the technology behind it deeply complex.

As a child, you might remember using numbers to substitute letters in the alphabet to create secret messages, and that example of ‘substitution cipher’ is perhaps the easiest way to illustrate how encryption works.

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

The AES is one of the most common encryption standards used by the government and hardware and software manufacturers.

By using something called ‘AES-256 bit’ encryption, the standard relies on the 1s and 0s of computer language to scramble data. This makes it incredibly secure. So secure, in fact, that it would take literally trillions of years to find the key and decipher data that has been 256 bit encrypted.

There isn’t a computer on earth can break AES encryption, and it’s largely accepted it’ll take several hundred years before such a feat is possible.

Print management and data in motion

‘Data at rest’ refers to information that is stored digitally on databases, within spreadsheets or in data warehouses. For most of us, it’s the most common type of data we access each day.

Once we start interacting with that data by downloading it to our devices or sending it onto printers, it’s defined as being ‘in motion’.

Protecting data on the move is challenging, but with solutions like the Xerox AltaLink, you can rely on print management software to harness the power of AES 256 bit encryption and ensure data is correctly scrambled and de-scrambled as it makes its journey across your business.

This is why investment in modern print devices and software is vital in ensuring the work of encryption is continued as you scan and print your documentation. Always look for terminology such as ‘IPsec’ and HTTPS’ when shopping for devices!

Encryption and the GDPR

With the new GDPR data protection rules fast approaching, encryption is becoming an increasingly hot topic for businesses.

Far from being something that can be left to get on with its job behind the scenes, encryption needs to be embraced as a standard that should exist throughout your organisation.

You don’t need a detailed technical understanding, as we’ve proved in this blog post, but you do need the tools that provide AES-level encryption throughout your network - particularly when data makes its way to multi-function devices.