Spotlight: ShardSecure on Protecting Data At Rest Without Encryption

In this Spotlight edition of the podcast, we speak with Marc Blackmer of ShardSecure about that company’s new approach to protecting data at rest. Marc and I talk about the challenges of securing data in hybrid cloud and on-premises environments and how ShardSecure’s Microshard(TM) technology is being used to protect firms from inadvertent data leaks as well as threats like ransomware. As always,  you can check our full conversation in our latest Security Ledger podcast at Blubrry. You can also listen to it on iTunes and Spotify. Or, check us out on Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Radio Public and more. Also: if you enjoy this podcast, consider signing up to receive it in your email. Just point your web browser to securityledger.com/subscribe to get notified whenever a new podcast is posted.  [MP3] Marc is the Head of Marketing at ShardSecure Securing data at rest seems like a problem that we should have solved a long time ago. And yet, a quick scan of the headlines tells us that the truth is far from that. Barely a week goes by without revelations of large-scale data breaches and leaks from both corporate networks and, increasingly, cloud-hosted infrastructure.  Data At Rest = Data At Risk In recent days, online gaming firm SEGA Europe admitted that an audit revealed sensitive data was being stored in an unsecured Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 bucket. In December, it was Audio equipment manufacturer Sennheiser, which admitted that it exposed the personal data of around 28,000 customers through a misconfigured S3 bucket, How to Overcome Threat Detection and Response Challenges Encryption tools for securing that data are widely available, but they come with costs both in management overhead and in speed of access. Besides, public key encryption has been the go-to for securing digital data for four decades. Isn’t it time for another approach? Microshard: A New Approach Our guest today says that he may have one. Marc Blackmer is the Head of Marketing at ShardSecure, an innovative, Boston-based start up that has come up with a novel way to secure data on premises and in the cloud without using encryption. As its name suggests: Shard fragments and scatters stored data across various data repositories, only to reassemble it on request.  In this interview, Marc and I talk about the Shard technology and how it works, and about some of the market and business dynamics are driving companies to look beyond th...