Data is the oil that keeps the wheels of our digital economy turning. It’s the fuel that sustains interactions between people and connects organizations to their customers. Data facilitates and informs decision-making and problem-solving. It underpins positive change. It steers the course to increased operational efficiency, productivity, and ultimately, profitability.
But the value data creates is only matched by the degree of risk it introduces. From proprietary intellectual property to confidential customer insights, you need to ensure that your data remains secure and accessible only to authorized parties.
Your business’s profitability – and reputation – depend on it.
What is data security?
Data security is understood as a set of processes and practices designed to protect your most valuable data. Common data security methods include:
- Access Controls: Measures focused on limiting physical and digital access to critical systems and sensitive data
- Authentication: The process of identifying and validating users before allowing them to access data using passwords, PINs, security tokens, and biometrics, among others
- Backups and Recovery: Proactive plans that ensure that any system failure, disaster, data corruption, or breach won’t impact your ability to safeguard and access your data
- Data Resiliency: Ensuring that systems, hardware, and software can withstand and recover from failures
- Encryption: Computer algorithms convert text characters into an unreadable format using secret encryption keys; only authorized users with the correct corresponding keys can unlock and access the data
Why is data security important?
Data security is vital for businesses on several levels. First, there are many legal and regulatory rules aimed at ensuring your user and customer data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
The consequences of a data breach can be grave. Aside from steep fines you’ll incur, the damage to your company’s reputation and brand trust can be equally – if not more – devastating.
Clearly, data security deserves a place on the boardroom agenda. But with a deluge of data security solutions flooding the market, how do you identify and correctly deploy the correct one for your business?
And the complexity doesn’t end there.
Many security solutions providers tout their wares as impenetrable and designed to thwart the next generation of data security threats. However, very few are genuinely future proof.
Let’s explore why that’s the case and what your options are.
Data security solutions under the spotlight.
Contemporary data security solutions are designed to reduce the risks associated with the storage, handling, and transmission of data. And, as we’ve outlined above, they leverage a range of controls, protocols, applications, and techniques to do so.
But there are notable and concerning chinks in the armour of traditional data security approaches.
It starts with cryptography.
Cryptography is the cornerstone of current methods used to protect the world’s data.
Today, everything from passwords to digital signatures and top-secret military communications is based on mathematical problems that would take classical computers millions of years to solve. And that’s precisely where most of these traditional data security methods and approaches fall short. They’re not geared to comprehensively respond to the looming threat of quantum computing.
The quantum threat.
Quantum computers can solve problems beyond the capabilities of traditional computers, or which would take them an inordinate amount of time to unravel.
But Quantum computers are also changing the landscape of data security. And not necessarily all for the better. That’s because advances in quantum computing are being used to break today’s encryption methods. This has been a looming threat for quite some time, but it’s starting to come into sharper focus.
Recent reports of people using functionality such as quantum annealers to find weaknesses in common encryption methods have CTOs and governments worldwide on high alert.
And we can be sure there’ll be more threats to come.
Once a sufficiently powerful quantum computer becomes commercially available, traditional cryptographic defenses will collapse very quickly. And standard asymmetric public-key encryption systems like RSA will be rendered incapable of protecting the world’s data from bad actors.
So, businesses everywhere need to prepare for a harsh reality: current cryptographic defenses that secure their data today are destined to be broken.
How to choose the right solution for your business.
The time to start thinking about protecting your data from the quantum threat is NOW.
Without robust and quantum-safe cryptography, threat actors with access to quantum computers will target data that powers all kinds of modern applications.
Businesses must define their “data storage” timeline to figure out which data will only be around for a few years versus which data will retain its value for at least ten to thirty years.
Simply put, they must start thinking about quantum-proof cryptography methods sooner rather than later.
Prepare for today and be ready to scale.
When it comes to getting ahead of the curve by preparing for tomorrow’s quantum threats today, business and government leaders worldwide can choose to be innovators and the most responsible.
Most current approaches to quantum-ready data security fall down outside the laboratory. What’s more, they’re prohibitively expensive, require new dark fiber infrastructure, or are otherwise unfit for real-world applications.
To help protect against the inevitability of quantum computing attacks, Quantropi is pioneering new standards for next-generation data security – forever unbreakable, no matter what. Our enterprise-grade solutions work over unlimited distances on existing network infrastructure, even the wireless Internet. Even as that infrastructure continues to evolve.
Bring it on.
Only Quantropi provides all 3 prerequisites for cryptographic integrity: Trust, Uncertainty, and Entropy (TrUE). Powered by quantum mechanics expressed as linear algebra, our patented TrUE technologies establish Trust between any two parties via quantum-secure asymmetric MASQ™ encryption; ensure Uncertainty to attackers, rendering data uninterpretable forever, with QEEP™ symmetric encryption; and provide Entropy as a Service (EaaS) with SEQUR™ – ultra-random key generation and distribution to enable secure data communications. All Quantropi’s TrUE technologies are accessible via our flagship QiSpace™ platform.
So now, you can have confidence your data is secure today – and always will be.
Interested in finding out more about how Quantropi is rising to the data security challenge and how our solutions can protect your business-critical data?
Why not contact us to speak with one of our specialists?
