Unleashing the Power of Complete Data Security
It’s true that PKWARE’s most enduring legacy has been the ZIP format that founder Phil Katz developed in conjunction with Gary Conway in the late 1980s. Katz then used this format in his PKZIP program, offering exceptional data compression for that time.
The next iteration of PKWARE’s ZIP solutions was SecureZIP. Released in 2004, this program combined data compression with enhanced encryption functionality and is still popular with many organizations around the world today.
But 2004 was a long time ago, and we’ve made a few changes since then.
We’re More than Just ZIP
The number of data breaches continues to climb year over year and hackers are getting more sophisticated with their attacks: IT Governance found an 11 percent increase in security incidents in 2021 compared to the previous year, underscoring the critical need for data security solutions. Business leaders know it’s important to have all parts of a business protected—from endpoints to the full distributed enterprise in data lakes and the cloud. And the only way to do that is to have a comprehensive data security solution that meets a company’s unique security needs today while also adapting to the latest threats over time.
Last year, we introduced our expanded data protection product suite, PK Protect, to the market. Built on successful cybersecurity technology from Smartcrypt and DgSecure, PK Protect provides the necessary data security solutions for enterprises’ most sensitive data on endpoints, the cloud, and beyond. And while you can continue to rely on tools like SecureZIP, we wanted to highlight all the additional features PK Protect brings, including discovery, classification, masking, and privacy capabilities.
If you’ve even briefly considered making the switch to PK Protect, here are some of the top benefits your organization could start seeing immediately.
From SecureZIP to PK Protect
Nowadays, businesses are amassing petabytes of data, but can often be unaware of exactly what they are collecting and where it’s being stored. In the modern business environment, it’s extremely important to know exactly what data you have, not only so you can use it to its full potential, but also to meet regulatory requirements. Because how can you protect what you don’t know you have?
PK Protect’s data discovery tool, PK Discovery, can find sensitive data such as credit card numbers or personally identifiable information (PII) across the enterprise, on endpoints, servers, databases, and beyond. In fact, it’s the only data discovery and protection solution that can be applied to any device or IT environment and automatically locates and secures sensitive data—thus minimizing organizational risks and costs. In fact, 100 percent of customers who have deployed PK Discovery said they found sensitive data they didn’t even know they had.
While SecureZIP does have encryption capabilities, you’re already aware that the encryption is limited to compressing and sending files. PK Encryption, the encryption application of PK Protect, can encrypt all files, from data stored in cloud servers to data repositories. Protection is persistently applied to the data itself for hundreds of file types so sensitive information stays encrypted no matter where it is stored, shared, or copied.
If you’re amassing data and using that for additional business needs, it’s important to stay in compliance with federal and industry-specific regulations. PK Protect’s PK Privacy has many uses, including the ability for companies to promptly respond to data subject access requests (DSARs) and protecting privacy simultaneously at the individual, enterprise, and data inventory and risk management levels. PK Privacy is especially helpful to enterprises that are global or have global customers and need to stay up to date on ever-evolving regulations for data privacy across a range of geographies and jurisdictions. This also includes industry-specific regulations, like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which just released its most recent update in version 4.0. No matter what regulations your business needs to comply with, PK Privacy can help your organization avoid costly fines for non-compliance.
More than Endpoints and Enterprises
Customers who are legacy PKWARE users know the power of protecting endpoints—especially in this age of remote and hybrid work. With PK Protect, you can now extend that protection to your entire distributed enterprise environment, including data lakes and the cloud. In 2020, we announced our acquisition of Dataguise, and have since integrated enterprise data security solutions into our full PKWARE offering. As a result, all of our PKWARE users now have the opportunity to access a full-range solution that secures sensitive data stored across enterprises and endpoints, and anywhere data may move to.
Many of our customers start out with PK Discovery as an introduction to the PK Protect suite, and then quickly expand to leverage additional automation tools. With PK Discovery, customers can automate data discovery across structured, unstructured and semi-structured data. Then, adding PK Classification allows enterprises to simplify systematic manual and automatic classification to achieve enterprise-wide sensitive data classification compliance. Additionally, PK Masking automatically masks and permanently obscures sensitive data in analytics and tests databases; sensitive data like Social Security numbers are automatically masked no matter where the data travels to, so the information cannot be exploited. Lastly, PK Encryption converts data into encrypted values for emails, files, and databases, on-premises and in data stores of all major cloud players.
The future of data security is in intelligent automation since ensuring constant protection of a company’s most sensitive data cannot be done manually. Enterprises are continually amassing petabytes of data through various sources, and automation is critical to secure it. PK Protect does this with unmatched automation technology to ensure protection is running 24/7/365.
Moving to PK Protect
Implementing the full PK Protect suite means eliminating the cost and complexity of deploying and managing multiple security solutions from different vendors to protect all your sensitive data. The five tools in PK Protect’s suite work together to ensure all parts of a business are protected and in compliance with regulations. And, moving from SecureZIP is seamless: PK Protect can be up and running within hours, rather than months, so you can start unleashing the potential of your data immediately.
Business is continuing to innovate, and cyber threats are too. Make sure you have the most modern data encryption and protection solution running on your data. Talk to your PKWARE representative about moving to PK Protect or request a free demo.
