Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

  1. Home
  2. Wireless-infrastructure
  3. Architecting-data-security
  4. Page
  5. Architecting for Data Security: Page 2 of 8
Wireless Infrastructure

Architecting for Data Security: Page 2 of 8

IT pros must understand and address the liability associated with granting unfettered access to sensitive data. We explore methods for safeguarding private information while keeping it usable for applications.
December 01, 2006

So what can you do to protect sensitive data, ensuring that only authorized users can see it? A lot.

Encryption

First, encrypt selected fields--such as those containing credit-card information--in your databases. Yes, this will slow database performance somewhat, but modern encryption/decryption technologies are getting faster, and today's databases can take advantage of your multicore server CPUs to handle these tasks. With few exceptions your servers are running at between 0 percent and 15 percent CPU usage.

With that amount of processor headroom, one could assume there's enough capacity to encrypt the entire database, but we recommend against it since encryption eats up processor headroom very quickly. Encrypted data takes up more space in the database and requires more decryption/encryption work to extract or insert data.

Tags:

News
Wireless Infrastructure
Networking