In the modern digital landscape, data is the lifeblood of every organization, driving value across various business lines and expanding across cloud environments. As the data footprint grows, securing data at all stages of cloud adoption and throughout its lifecycle becomes essential. While numerous mechanisms exist to encrypt data—whether in transit, at rest, or in use—application-level encryption (ALE) stands out by providing an additional layer of protection by encrypting data at its source. This strategy significantly enhances an organization’s data security, privacy, and sovereignty posture.
Application-level encryption integrates data security directly within the application, ensuring that data is encrypted before storage or transmission. This approach minimizes potential attack points by tightening security controls down to the data itself. As cyber threats become more sophisticated, adopting ALE can be a game-changer in safeguarding sensitive information and mitigating the risks associated with data breaches.
The Necessity of Application-Level Encryption
Figure 1 illustrates a typical three-tier application deployment, where the backend writes data to a managed Postgres instance. Data flows from the end user, encrypted in transit to the application, between application microservices (UI and backend), and from the application to the database. The database then encrypts the data at rest using strategies such as Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) or Keep Your Own Key (KYOK).
In this deployment, both runtime and database administrators are inside the trust boundary, assuming no harm from these personas. However, most cybersecurity breaches have a human element at their root, often occurring through error, privilege misuse, or stolen credentials. Placing these privileged users outside the trust boundary can mitigate these risks, and this is where application-level encryption comes into play.
Application-level encryption ensures that data is encrypted within the application and remains encrypted throughout its lifecycle until accessed by the same application. This method effectively removes database administrators and operators from the trust boundary, preventing them from accessing sensitive data in clear text. However, implementing ALE can require changes to the application backend, introducing another set of privileged users (ALE service admin and security focal) within the trust boundary. Managing encryption keys within the ALE service can also pose challenges.
IBM Cloud® Security and Compliance Center (SCC) Data Security Broker (DSB) offers a solution to these challenges. DSB provides application-level encryption with a no-code change approach, seamlessly masking, encrypting, and tokenizing data. It enforces role-based access control (RBAC) with field and column-level granularity, ensuring comprehensive data protection without altering the application code.
DSB comprises two components: DSB Manager (the control plane) and DSB Shield (the data plane). DSB Manager operates outside the data path and trust boundary, managing policies such as encryption, masking, and RBAC. DSB Shield, the data plane component, enforces these policies using customer-owned keys, ensuring that data protection measures are applied without any code changes to the application.
Data Security Broker offers several significant benefits:
Security: Personally identifiable information (PII) is anonymized before ingestion into the database, protecting it even from database and cloud administrators. This ensures that sensitive data remains secure throughout its lifecycle.
Ease: Data protection is applied seamlessly across data flows without requiring code changes to the application. This simplifies the implementation process and reduces the risk of errors.
Efficiency: DSB supports scaling, ensuring that the end user perceives no impact on application performance. This allows organizations to maintain robust security measures without sacrificing operational efficiency.
Control: DSB provides customer-controlled key management access to data, giving organizations complete control over their encryption keys and data security policies. This enhances trust and accountability in managing sensitive information.
Avoiding Data Breaches and Ensuring Compliance
Data breaches come with high costs, including time to address the breach, potential industry and regulatory compliance violations, associated penalties, and reputational damage. Mitigating these risks is often time-consuming and expensive, requiring extensive application changes to secure sensitive data and meet compliance requirements. Ensuring a strong data protection posture helps avoid these risks.
According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach 2023 report, the global average cost to remediate a data breach was USD 4.45 million, a 15% increase over three years. This statistic underscores the financial impact of inadequate data security measures. By implementing robust data protection strategies, organizations can minimize these costs and protect their sensitive information.
Data Security Broker simplifies the implementation of application-level encryption, ensuring comprehensive data protection without the need for extensive code changes. This no-code approach enhances data security, privacy, and sovereignty, helping organizations mitigate the risks associated with data breaches and maintain regulatory compliance.
Conclusion
As data continues to drive business value across various lines and cloud environments, securing it at all stages of the cloud adoption and data lifecycle becomes paramount. Application-level encryption provides an additional layer of protection by encrypting data at its source, significantly enhancing data security, privacy, and sovereignty posture.
IBM Cloud® Security and Compliance Center (SCC) Data Security Broker (DSB) offers a no-code approach to application-level encryption, seamlessly masking, encrypting, and tokenizing data. With its robust security measures, ease of implementation, and efficiency, DSB helps organizations avoid the risks associated with data breaches and ensures ongoing compliance with regulatory requirements.
Incorporating application-level encryption and Data Security Broker into your data protection strategy is a proactive step towards safeguarding sensitive information and enhancing your organization’s overall security posture. As cyber threats continue to evolve, staying ahead with advanced data protection measures is essential for maintaining trust, compliance, and operational resilience.
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