Each month many companies, big or small, well known or unknown, experience a data security loss with the potential exposure of thousands to millions of sensitive customer or employee records. Recent regulatory actions have made such losses much more onerous. Corporations need to reduce the financial risks of a security breach as well as protect their brand reputation. As such, corporate management is looking to CIOs to minimize these risks with effective security for all sensitive corporate data, wherever it may reside.

Encryption has emerged as a best practice mechanism to security breach risk. As an important consideration for corporate officers, this brief examines cryptographic methods that can mitigate risks associated with data security breaches, specifically tape data encryption. LTO technology is the most widely adopted data storage tape format and as such, LTO-4 drive encryption will be thoroughly examined along with an LTO-4 encryption user case study.