Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) – The Untold Story

As cries around security and privacy in the cloud gained momentum, a handful of cloud and SaaS vendors have countered that with a concept that is commonly advertised to customers as Bring Your Own Encryption (BYOE) also referred to as Bring Your Own Key (BYOK). The idea here is to overcome the fundamental objection that the encryption of data at rest which is provided by the public cloud or SaaS vendors is not adequate protection for customer data, since the cloud or SaaS vendor can decrypt the data and gain access to it any time. BYOK strives to reassure customers that they control the keys used for encrypting their data in the cloud. But do they really Each time I meet an IT manager or CIO, I am surprised at how good a marketing job proponents of BYOK have done.g Your Own Key does allow the customer to provide an encryption key