September 19, 2023 - In the Hype Cycle for Data Security, 2023, Gartner recognized Prime Factors as a Sample Vendor for the Format-Preserving Encryption (FPE) and Data Security Platforms (DSP) categories.

In the report, "Gartner estimates that by 2025, 75% of the world's population will have its personal data covered under modern privacy regulations." The rise in security threats and increase in security and privacy requirements continuously add to the challenges of upholding a strong and effective data security program. Gartner discusses the significance of DSPs for this reason, stating, "DSPs typically protect data by using policy-based authorization controls — for example, database APIs, dynamic data masking, format-preserving encryption (FPE) or tokenization."

"We believe that as the complexity of protecting sensitive information continues to increase, enterprises more than ever need tools that offer flexibility and optionality, but that also make it easier to protect data how and where it matters most." - Justin Teitt, CMO and COO, Prime Factors

Gartner explores the rising importance of crypto-agility, which they define in the report as: "Crypto-agility is the capability to transparently swap out encryption algorithms and related artifacts in an application, and replace them with newer, different and, presumably, safer algorithms." The report predicts, "Because quantum computing poses an increasing threat to existing cryptography, Gartner expects crypto-agility to be a significant differentiator for technology vendors."

"As more privacy laws take affect globally, we see a growing urgency for enterprises to deploy solutions that can deliver the broad functionality required to meet the challenges of evolving security and privacy requirements," said Justin Teitt, CMO and COO of Prime Factors. "We believe that solutions that can deliver a variety of security functionality in a single code base are well positioned to address today's security challenges; however, architectures can also support seamless changes to security functionality without integration re-work and can go further to help future-proof data security over time. This philosophy is reflected in the functional design of our EncryptRIGHT data security platform, which delivers the broad features needed to secure sensitive data effectively with an architecture that allows security functions to be swapped out over time, without re-architecture."

In the Format Preserving Encryption ("FPE") section of the report, Gartner states, "Adoption is increasing due to the fast-growing need to provide data protection, data residency restrictions, and increasing number of privacy laws across the globe," but goes on to caution, "Encryption keys not managed by resilient life cycle best practices and enterprise key management (EKM) could lead to the loss of larger amounts of data if the encryption keys are lost." According to Gartner, "EKM is a means to ensure encryption is applied consistently across a variety of storage platforms," and "EKM policies are needed to define a consistent granularity of cryptography that is required to enforce appropriate user access controls to data."

"For nearly 30 years, Prime Factors sold SDKs that delivered robust encryption but left key management up to our customers," said Teitt. "But this changed with the launch of EncryptRIGHT, which natively provides the functionality of a robust enterprise key manager for all of the data we secure. Centralized data protection policies in EncryptRIGHT secure data using a variety of techniques with tremendous granularity of control, giving even the most discerning information security team the tools, they need to consistently and effectively secure data and enforce privacy. We believe that as the complexity of protecting sensitive information continues to increase, enterprises more than ever need tools that offer flexibility and optionality, but that also make it easier to protect data how and where it matters most."

Gartner clients can access the full report here.

*Gartner, Hype Cycle for Data Security, 2023, Brian Lowans, July 14, 2023.

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