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When important people need protection, how does it usually work? For example, a president, prime minister or other world leader? Typically, if there’s any kind of expected threat, it’s full protection round the clock, everywhere and with no margin for error.

Now imagine that, instead of this kind of protection, a world leader under threat had multiple locations that were very secure but, when they moved between locations, instead of armored cars and lots of bodyguards, they had to run alone through the streets to get to their destination?

That wouldn’t be very secure. In fact, anyone who wanted to nab that leader would find it pretty easy to get them in-transit when they are most vulnerable.

Yep, that would definitely be a bad way to try to secure someone or something. Yet surprisingly, this is exactly the way that many enterprises treat the business data that, if stolen, could lead to serious losses, not to mention embarrassment and a lasting negative reputation.

Does this setup sound familiar to you? Servers, applications and other information in the data center are heavily secured and protected. And when that data is at rest in the organization’s storage infrastructure, it is secured and encrypted so that it is useless to those looking to steal the data.

But when that data is in-flight from servers and data centers to remote storage infrastructures, it isn’t encrypted or secured. And this means that any moderately skilled malicious hacker could easily steal this data.

This is a dilemma of many IP-based storage infrastructures. The use of traditional networking technologies makes it easy to connect multiple locations and storage infrastructures over distance. But the use of these networks also brings greater security risks and dangers.

And you don’t need to look very far to find the serious consequences that can come from poorly protected data. In the last year major retailers such as Home Depot and Staples have had major data breaches. And look at the huge lesson from Sony, a massively destructive and embarrassing breach, costing the co-chair her job, on email and communications data that isn’t normally seen as business critical.

However, there are steps that businesses can take to improve security and avoid this kind of data loss disaster. In much the same way that security services protect a world leader at all times, including while they travel, smart organizations can take advantage of on-the-fly and over the air encryption to ensure that their data is secure even during transit to remote sites.

Using this kind of technology, all company data is protected from prying eyes. When it travels over the IP networks to the storage infrastructure, the data isn’t in the clear and easily read, it’s encrypted. With this kind of solution, leading organizations can close the gaps in their security and protect all of their company information.

Because it’s not good enough to just be secure when at rest, data needs to be secured when it’s on the go as well.