A new solution from Patrick Townsend Security Solutions marks a giant step forward in encryption key management.

I was listening to a presentation on security and encryption key management at last summer's OCEAN conference when the speaker made a point eminently clear to the audience: It's not your encryption solution that is a challenge to manage, it's your encryption keys that take some finesse.

The speaker was Pat Botz of Group8 Security, and he spent the next hour explaining how encryption key management systems work. Members of the audience seemed to be interested in the topic, presumably because they were contemplating implementing an encryption solution.

It's a subject whose time has come, considering the networking that is being undertaken and contemplated and the widespread use of the Internet to communicate sensitive information. There is a bit of an oxymoron there, if you think about it. Saying you will send your sensitive data over the Internet is like saying you are sending your six-year-old daughter home from school after dark through a gang-infested neighborhood--on foot.

I was chatting with Patrick Townsend a few weeks back, and told him I thought the rebranding of his Olympia, Washington, company from Patrick Townsend & Associates to Patrick Townsend Security Solutions was right on target for today's market. Townsend has been working in the area of security ever since I started in the industry back in the early 1990s, and he has been working in data encryption for more than 10 years. He says that during the decade he has been concentrating on encryption, he has seen a "growing need for better encryption key management." So now we have two security experts pointing toward encryption key management as a critical piece in effectively managing enterprise security.

Townsend has now announced he has a solution that takes encryption key management to a new level and for a cost that most businesses can handle. He calls it the Alliance Key Manager appliance, and it's being released during the first quarter of 2009. The new key management solution will provide enterprise customers, VARs, and ISVs an affordable way to handle symmetric encryption key creation, storage, and management.

For those who want a complete encryption solution, you will need something like Townsend's Alliance AES Encryption product in addition to the appliance, and there are a number of other encryption solutions out there. However, the Alliance Key Manager works with all leading data encryption applications and legacy devices when connected via a serial port. It also works with all leading major business platforms, including IBM i, which has been Townsend's specialty over the years. Today, he provides data encryption, key management, and compliance-logging solutions to enterprise customers on a variety of server platforms, including IBM i, Linux, UNIX, Windows, and even System z.

The appliance lets system or security administrators configure, manage, import, export, create, and expire encryption keys manually or automatically, the latter being a nice work-saving feature. The fact that it supports programmable administration significantly lightens the load associated with any encryption solution, and that's one of the main reasons administrators hesitate at their adoption. Getting tangled up with encryption issues has been something that many administrators just couldn't spare the time for in the past. The administration of the appliance is secure because it is over an authenticated SSL/TLS connection.

What scares many people is the thought of losing keys and not being able to get at critical encrypted data. The Alliance Key Manager mirrors keys to sensitive encrypted data between multiple key management appliances, however, for hot backup and disaster recovery support. This addresses a major concern of encryption solutions: how do you manage a fire, earthquake, or other disaster in a way that you don't risk losing access to your data?

Knowing who, what, when, where, why, and how relative to encryption keys is important, so the Townsend appliance has a built-in logging feature that is time-synchronized. It allows administrators to track all key retrieval, management, and system activity with reports automatically being sent to a central log management area or facility.

The solution, which will retrieve keys in three formats--Binary, Base16, and Base 64 (for applications that cannot receive binary information)--is highly scalable and works with any number of connected servers or users without limitation or extra charges. That last feature is so unlike the rest of the industry that one has to wonder how it will ever be profitable. But then, that sense that you are not being gouged is one of the pleasant reasons people like doing business with Patrick Townsend. Undoubtedly, another one will be access to his new Alliance Key Manager.