Vormetric announced Vormetric Encryption V5, which significantly reduces the cost and application impact of encryption by using software enhancements and hardware encryption technologies such as Intel’s AES-NI and SPARC Niagara Crypto accelerators when available.

It can secure any database or application environment while imposing near zero percent overhead for typical transaction workloads with hardware-assisted instructions (Intel AES-NI) on x86 servers. This performance boost enables enterprises to significantly lower the cost of encryption and free up CPU cycles for applications and data processing.

In addition, the solution includes scalability enhancements that make it possible to secure sizable numbers of file systems and data volumes that are expected in large enterprise environments.

A single Vormetric Data Security Manager (DSM) appliance cluster can provide centralized policy and key management for the biggest enterprise servers with large numbers of data sets, and tens of thousands of multi-core server farms.

The Data Security Manager simplifies the task of creating system, domain and security administrator accounts through selection of credentialed users from directory servers such as Active Directory or other directory services using the LDAP/LDAPS protocols. In addition, Vormetric software agents integrate with directory services for enforcing encryption access control policies to users, groups, and hosts.

To ensure the highest level of security for administrative access, the Encryption Data Security Manager provides two-factor authentication with support for RSA SecureID. This capability improves security by preventing attackers and malicious insiders from accessing the appliances that control data security policies.

According to Forrester Research, “Ubiquitous encryption is the only hope we have of maintaining some kind of parity with attackers in the new threat landscape. Not only does encryption devalue the data from the attacker’s perspective, it generally places that data outside the scope of compliance regimes like PCI or US state privacy laws…. Compliance mandates and privacy laws have given companies incentives to deploy more and more encryption. As sensitive data very often resides in enterprise databases, it is no surprise that encryption of storage and databases is becoming more common. ”