Thales Introduces Enterprise Encryption Key Governance for Microsoft Azure

Thales, a critical information systems, cybersecurity and data security vendor, has recently announced it is collaborating with Microsoft to provide key management services for Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Office 365 in order to allow organizations to maximize the control of their data and provide the highest level of assurance, regardless of whether the data is on-premise or in the cloud.

Secure key management is essential to protecting data, Thales believes. Microsoft Azure-based applications now use Azure Key Vault to access a variety of key management capabilities, such as key creation, backup and rotation, as well as basic crypto operations like encrypt/decrypt and sign. All of this happens within the boundary of a Thales hardware security module (HSM).

“The cloud is making businesses reassess how they think about and use technology,” said Cindy Provin, Chief Strategy Officer, Thales e-Security. “Shared services and public cloud infrastructures, however, do not always have a clear demarcation of tenant execution and storage space, so the security of the services therefore depends on the level of protection given to the cryptographic keys used to protect the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive data. Thales already offers 'bring your own key' (BYOK) to Microsoft Azure, providing the confidence to trust the service with an organization's most valuable assets. Our collaboration with Microsoft to offer key management-as-a-service will further enhance and simplify the governance around those keys.”

Regardless of where the keys are stored, the integrated vision of the two companies is to provide a consistent single pane of glass allowing enterprises to effectively manage their encryption keys across diverse environments, enforce business policy and workflow for how keys are provisioned, stored, accessed and monitored.

“As our customers ingest more and more keys to encrypt an ever-growing variety of Microsoft Azure resources, the ability to manage and govern those keys becomes critical to staying in control,” said Sumedh Barde, Group Program Manager, Microsoft Azure Key Vault, Microsoft. “Thales Key management-as-a-service for Azure is a great step forward in answering customer demands for central visibility of all those keys as well as the ability to govern them.”