In a world that has gone (understandably) paranoid, businesses and individuals alike are always on the lookout for ways to keep their data and information safe and away from prying eyes.

At the moment, small businesses find themselves to be the unfortunate victims of choice by the hacking world and have increasingly being upping their network and server security budgets in hopes of keeping one step ahead.

Of course, not all of them manage to escape attacks intact.

Most of these businesses rely on the good old ways: locking down their hardware. They primarily rely on software and hardware devices that prevent the attackers from getting in. For the most part these work fine and help curb the attacks from happening before they have even begun.

But what happens when the hackers prove to be smarter than the software and hardware devices? What if they had gotten access – or were already behind the defenses because they are employees (yes, it does happen) – and were privy to all the information that was stored on a supposedly impregnable server?

Well, unless they were somehow prevented from actually reading or deciphering it, the loss of data could spell disaster for the business or, much worse, for the actual people whose information was accessed by the data thieves.

So, how does one go about preventing the deciphering of data?

Thankfully, there is a way of making sure that only the people that need to see and access the data do so: by using data encryption.

What is it?

Data encryption is the process of ensuring that only the person that is authorized to access information (it could be an email, a text message or a file, for example) will be able to open and read the content.

This is ensured by coding the message or file so that in order to have it decoded the reader will need to use a “decryption key.” Anyone that doesn’t have this key will simply not be able to open the file.

There are two main types of encryption-decryption process. In Symmetric key encryption both keys are the same and the creator of the document or file and the person that wants to access or read it have the same keys.

Meanwhile, in Public key encryption the key is published to the public but only the person that is supposed to access the file has the key that will let them access it.

Why do you need it?

As mentioned earlier, the main reason a business would want to encrypt its data is because it simply didn’t want anyone to access it – whether they had managed to get into the network to access it or they had “kidnapped” it while it was en-route from one device to another.

But, what else?

1. The cloud is the future and any business that needs to keep up with the times needs to think about moving towards it sooner rather than later.

And so, for a business to place its data in the cloud it should make sure that no one that isn’t supposed to access it, doesn’t do so.

This becomes even more important when realizing that their data could be sharing the same server with that of their competitors. That is quite tempting a treasure that has been put within their reach. In today’s world, commercial espionage – even at its most basic level – could result in the competitors gaining an edge over others.

2. If the business has a website where money is transacted and purchases are made, there will be a need for some sort of payment gateway to be implemented. But most of the popular and most-commonly used gateways require certain criteria to be met before they will allow their products to be used one of them which is that the website has an encryption mechanism put in place (usually using SSL).

This is especially true in instances where credit or debit cards are accepted as forms of payment.

3. Some businesses need to communicate with their clients on a regular basis. And in some of that communication, there is always the chance that very sensitive information is being included.

These businesses should do their utmost to make sure nothing of that sort of information gets leaked, because the lawsuit that will definitely follow could bring them to their knees.

Almost all the states in the US have data breach notification laws. Should a data breach occur where personally identifiable data is lost the business must notify all the victims.

Fortunately, most of these laws have a safe harbor clause from public notification if the data that was stolen was encrypted and the business that was breached managed to protect the encryption keys.

This means, encryption could save the businesses that have been attacked from having to pay out millions of dollars to the affected victims.

4. Data that has been backed up to servers in the cloud will always remain safe as the providers that store the data won’t be able to access or use it. This ensures a secure fall back for the business in case of a crash.

Simply put, data encryption has no downside; and businesses should adopt it without delay.