The world is swimming in data. Everything from a person’s online activity to their health history has been made into data points. At the same time, the world is also crawling with hackers and bad actors who are looking to exploit that data for their own benefit. Cyber attacks, or attempts to gain unauthorized access to a digital environment, are a costly, unwelcome and potentially harmful reality of life on the internet — and they happen every day.
Fortunately, there is a growing number of cybersecurity companies with a vested interest in protecting the world’s data, and they use all kinds of tactics to do this kind of work. One common technique in this space is encryption.
Encryption Solution Companies to Know
- BitLocker
- Bluefin Payment Systems
- Duality Technologies
- IBM Security Guardium
- Keeper Security
- NCoded Communications
- NordLocker
- PassCamp
- ShardSecure
- Vircom
Put simply, encryption takes plain text such as a text message or email, and uses complex mathematical algorithms to scramble it into an unreadable format called a ciphertext. Once that ciphertext is sent to a given recipient, a sort of key, or cipher, can be used to decode the ciphertext back to its original format.
Encryption is the most widely used form of cryptography, or the secure transfer of data. And it has lots of different applications, including blockchain technology, voice authentication and the Internet of Things. Over the last few years especially, cryptography and encryption moved firmly into the mainstream amid the ongoing global conversation about data privacy. These companies are among the top players in this space.
Encryption Solution Companies to Know
AxCrypt was created to be used by individuals or small teams within a business, offering 128-bit to 256-bit AES encryption, an industry standard for data security. It also offers collaborative key-sharing, password management services for all stored files, as well as cloud storage capabilities. This platform is mobile friendly, and is usable in more than a dozen languages.
With a global security infrastructure capable of protecting half a billion endpoints, Bitdefender has become a prominent name in cybersecurity since its founding in 2001. The platform offers a veritable grab bag of security features, including autonomous ransomware and malware protection, a designated secure browser for online banking and phishing protection, a password wallet, and daily access to a virtual private network, or VPN, that lets users securely connect to any WiFi network. Bitdefender also offers a full-disk encryption module, which can be applied to any of its security solutions to ensure the data there is protected by loss or theft.
Microsoft’s BitLocker comprises a set of business tools that provide XTS-AES 128-bit device encryption. While it is mainly focused on the encryption of drives on devices right out of the box, it also can be used to protect removable drives through BitLocker To Go. Recovery keys can also be set to retrieve data should any firmware issues or errors prevent IT administrators from accessing encrypted drives. BitLocker is also useful in the event a computer is lost or stolen, leaving the data on it vulnerable to unauthorized access. It helps mitigate this risk by enhancing file and system protections, as well as rendering data inaccessible when its computers are decommissioned or recycled.
Bitwarden is an open-source password management software, offering everything from password generation to autofill features. It also allows users to transmit their data to each other securely through end-to-end encryption. Users can even store their debit and credit card details on the platform.
Bluefin specializes in tokenization and encryption technology to ensure secure payment processing from end to end, whether that transaction is point of sale or online. Its ShieldConex security platform also protects personally identifiable information, health information and payment data. The company works across a variety of industries, including healthcare, higher education, non-profits, retail and more. It is also one of many cybersecurity firms to be based in Atlanta — a city that is rapidly becoming a major tech hub in the United States.
Boxcryptor provides end-to-end encryption for companies that store their data in the cloud, and is compliant with internal and external privacy regulations. Here’s how it works: After a file has been encrypted using the AES algorithm, the AES key for decryption is also encrypted using the RSA public key. The AES encrypted key is then attached to the encrypted file. This method makes it possible for different users to open the same file with their own key, independently of each other, eliminating the need to transfer the file key. Boxcryptor supports several major cloud storage providers, including OneDrive, iCloud Drive, Google Drive and Dropbox.
Founded in 1993, Check Point is one of many publicly traded cybersecurity firms today, and is one of the leading companies to rely on encryption technology to provide a variety of security solutions. The software is designed to protect governments and businesses alike from malware, ransomware and other targeted cyber attacks. And, because threats like these often evolve quickly, it uses artificial intelligence to provide customizable threat intelligence, essentially allowing organizations to choose solutions to fit their needs in real-time. AI is also used to detect phishing attacks and create reports for future prevention measures.
Led by a team of cryptographers and data science executives, Duality helps companies like IBM, Oracle and Intel securely share, compute and analyze data in order to build AI models that are compliant with industry privacy regulations. Essentially, it allows companies to compute even the most sensitive data securely, without ever having to decrypt it. All data is encrypted, and those encrypted data sets are linked together. Artificial intelligence, machine learning and other analytics can then be applied to that encrypted data, resulting in a model that is also encrypted.
Enveil offers a variety of homomorphic encryption-powered solutions, meaning it allows computations to be performed on encrypted data, producing encrypted results that can then be decrypted. The idea is that the result is the same as if the math was done with unencrypted data, while eliminating the risk of theft by outside parties. Enveil’s trademarked Zero Reveal solution allows companies to share, collaborate and even monetize their protected data while it is being used and processed. With it, users can extract insights, search and analyze their data assets at scale without ever revealing the content of the search itself, or compromising its security.
IBM Security Guardium is capable of protecting sensitive and regulated data across multiple cloud environments, all while managing compliance, encrypting, responding to cyber threats and more. Using AI, the platform is able to automatically discover, classify and catalog data (both structured and unstructured) either on premises or on the cloud to uncover vulnerabilities. It also continuously protects that data using encryption, key management, real-time alerts and more.
Inpher’s cryptographic “secret computing” products allow data scientists to compute on distributed data without ever having to expose or move it, enabling them to improve their machine learning and analytical models privately and securely. Thanks to encryption, Inpher users can collaborate on their private data across departments and even organizations without actually exposing or transferring the information — all while meeting the compliance needs of global privacy and data regulations, including the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, and other data privacy laws.
Keeper Security is a password manager and identity management solution, allowing users to generate strong, random passwords and store them, as well as create custom multi-step verification protocols on any site on the web. It also has a digital security vault that lets users securely store and share files. Plus, Keeper BreachWatch monitors the dark web for data breaches. All told, Keeper protects thousands of businesses and millions of consumers globally with its encryption technology.
NCoded Communications implements what is called a zero-trust architecture, which essentially assumes that all attempts to access a system is a breach of some kind. No one is trusted, even if they are connected to a company network that is protected by a firewall, so extra steps are taken to ensure the security of the platform and all the data housed in it. In the case of NCoded, it employs various proprietary security measures to secure sensitive data from unwanted access, while also protecting data in-transit across any platform or device.
Offering a data encryption service called Folder Lock, NewSoftwares aims to offer “bulletproof” data encryption for both desktop and mobile devices. The app protects all personal files, videos and audio files, contracts, bank cards and notes. It also offers users the ability to back up all their passwords, set decoy passwords, log all authorized login attempts and get notified on potential brute-force attacks — a trial-and-error approach that involves repeatedly inputting different passwords and checking them against a cryptographic hash until the correct combination is found.
NordLocker is a file encryption app that uses two of the most powerful forms of encryption available today: AES-256-bit and 4096-bit RS. The whole thing is built on a zero-knowledge architecture, meaning even the company can’t see a user’s files. Nord also offers a service called NordVPN, which grants only certain, select individuals access to certain data stored in certain computers.
NuCypher offers security and encryption services for all kinds of distributed systems, including big data, blockchain, cloud and IoT. With Nucypher, users can protect any sensitive information they have, as well as conditionally grant and revoke access based on things like time and user behavior. The platform also allows users to share encrypted data to multiple people, even if they are using a low-powered device.
The PassCamp app securely stores an unlimited number of passwords using zero-knowledge, end-to-end encryption. Users can access their saved passwords from anywhere, as well as organize and track any changes they make to their passwords. Plus, the platform provides assistance on generating strong passwords and allows for easy and secure password sharing.
Using machine learning and various cloud-based security solutions, Proofpoint is designed to help companies protect their employees against all kinds of threats, including those delivered via social media, email and mobile apps. The platform also uses encryption to guard against data breaches and allows companies to view potentially suspicious activity that might be targeting their customers through things like email phishing scams and malicious web domains.
ShardSecure ensures data protection and compliance for companies across the technology, financial and biotech sectors. The software renders companies’ data unintelligible (and, therefore, useless) to outside parties by “digitally shredding” both structured and unstructured data into four-byte microshards, which are too small to retain sensitive information, according to the company. Then, it mixes those microshards across multiple logical containers, stripping out all the metadata, file names, file extensions, making it virtually impossible to reassemble them. Those containers are then distributed across multiple storage locations in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.
Ubiq helps developers quickly integrate encryption directly into their applications, even if they don’t have any prior encryption knowledge or experience. This is possible in any application type, and no other changes are made to the application or where the data is stored. The company claims its solution can go live in as few as 10 minutes, and is usable with a variety of data types.
Vircom offers a spam filter with an array of email protection services, including domain-level encryption and a backup inbox to use in case of server outages. It also offers an anti-phishing layer that is designed to prevent any personalized attacks. Plus, this is a software-as-a-service offering, meaning it requires no hardware or update installations — one can simply log in and use it.
