Encrypting the Data Warehouse

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I ran across a great article today published by the DM Review by Mark Thiessen "Encrypting the Data Warehouse".    In the article he breaks down the areas of import and the drivers for consideration.

I like how he asks the question can it be done and then breaks two places of concern into it’s components in it he says:

  • Data in Transit – generally accepted principles in play (SSL, VPN, …)
  • Data at Rest – data not being used by an application and is either being stored on disk or in OS cache.

So why the fuss:

  • Past issues as he cites
  • Compliance to legislation (SOX, personal, financial, health)

And then why is it so hard:

  • RDBMS searches and tools no longer work optimally
  • Increases data volume, variety, and velocity (store data, transaction history,…)
  • Need for performance – it has always been an issue till now, so slow it down further

I think you get the idea and I do not want to paraphrase the whole article.  He then goes on to cover some great approaches to solving this problem which I think are great, but still bring a huge hit on performance, so unless users are willing to have thigs slow down and the IT warehouse are up for spending more, I think you will still find CIO’s being very selective about what they encrypt.  So here are my thoughts on things to encrypt in the warehouse.

  • personal information – make the matching to the details of the person the last step in your query.
  • Credit card information – same as above
  • HR information – low volume low access data

So none of the above are new right, well your right, if you have high volume data in and a large number of users accessing the data, then we need to find a new way to secure the house because otherwise compliance is going to cost way too much. Another thought that we at Project X suggest is to define your guiding principles around encryption and security.

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