Backup is a very important component of data that is way too often misunderstood or ignored altogether. At least that's been my experience for several years now. From a security standpoint a backup – especially transportable “export/import” type backups that all databases offer in some form or another – presents an easy target for data theft.  Often that theft goes unnoticed or unreported. 

Just as many open source products, databases and data stores fail to offer transparent data encryption (TDE) to protect all the data in the database, so too do backups. “Unified Transparent Encryption” with Gazzang zNcrypt provides effective data encryption and key management for backup and recovery.

Last October, I wrote a blog called, Running a Secure (Encrypted) MySQL Backup Using mysqldump on Linux. The idea was to help zNcrypt users take some simple steps to protect their mysqldump jobs – securing the user/password credentials and the back files as well.  The blog grabbed the attention of MySQL guru and Oracle ACE Director Ronald Bradford, who wrote about it his latest book, MySQL Backup and Recovery Essentials.

Most often, a combination of backup types are needed to fully provide the high availability and disaster recovery needs. Fortunately, the benefits of Unified Transparent Encryption go beyond export/import or other native database backup utilities. Its also applicable to operating system and file-oriented methods.  With zNcrypt in place, applications read and write data in the same format as always – that’s the transparent encryption part. This is provided by a stack virtual filesystem.  The OS users can see these files, which are encrypted and secure.  Those files can safely be copied (backed up) and restored on another system. If that system has zNcrypt installed and the same key is configured, that data can once again be accessed via transparent encryption.

With this, data can be transferred in its encrypted form safely.  From enterprise to cloud, cloud to cloud, cloud to enterprise.  We’ve provided an example of this in prior blog. A number of Gazzang customers use this method via Zmanda based backups.

Taking this a step further, with something like DRDB or R1soft backup products that backup and synchronize at the block level, all the blocks are encrypted, the data is protected and as long as zNcrypt is installed with the same key on backup and recovery servers, it all works. 

Unified Transparent Encryption is very popular with Gazzang customers running big data. Value, flexibility, and ease of use are important for those big data architectures or search solutions like SolR where the same challenges exist. We’ll save those details for another blog, but certainly reach out if you need is imminent and we can share the secure data lifecycle as well with you.

Again, sensitive data is at risk anywhere it’s stored, backed up, exported, or imported.  Proper IT security involves mapping your data’s lifecycle and finding and remediating risks .  Encryption is a great security tool, but it can be hard to code and create on your own. Gazzang’s zNcrypt customers use the product day in day out to solve these challenges with simple and elegant Unified Encryption. If you’ve got a challenge that’s got you stumped, I’d be happy to have a look. Its amazing what Unified TDE can do.