IBM Pulse conference, Las Vegas and Weston, FL– 22 February 2010: Thales, leader in information systems and communications security, announces it is working with IBM to integrate IBM Tivoli® Key Lifecycle Manager into  Thales Encryption Manager for Storage (TEMS 2.0) to provide customers with a hardened tamper-resistant key management solution that fully exploits IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle Management capability.  TEMS will be expanded to address the key management requirements of the IBM storage portfolio of products, to provide important operational and security benefits to both IBM and Thales customers, including the convenience and assurance of a hardware appliance and standards-based key management controls needed to protect and store data and demonstrate compliance.

“The use of encryption within the switching fabric, back-up tapes, drives, arrays, and host adapters is rapidly becoming a popular security measure to help ensure data privacy and confidentiality, but many organizations are concerned about resilience and data recoverability issues,” says Jon Oltsik, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. “These issues can be addressed by the adoption of best practice key management, which when deployed correctly can unify security practices and reduce operational burden. The integration of Thales Encryption Manager for Storage with IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager will help customers adopt leading-edge storage encryption with the confidence that their encryption keys are under control and secured in a cost-effective and future proof management system.”

TEMS 2.0 is an easily deployed key management solution that consolidates and automates the man¬age¬ment of encryption keys for heterogeneous storage environments delivering unified, fine-grained and auditable security controls and therefore greatly simplifies compliance reporting obligations. TEMS is delivered as a hardened tamper-resistant security appliance providing industry leading levels of protection* ensuring that keys are safe from attack and accidental loss and yet available on demand for legitimate data retrieval, emergency recovery and forensic activities. TEMS is the first key manager to support the draft IEEE P1619.3 key management standard and now with the integration of IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager functionality, customers will be able to manage keys across an even broader range of encryption-enabled storage devices and end-points – in particular IBM’s LTO4 tape and DS8000 disk storage systems.

“Key management provides a cryptographic layer of security that helps clients meet the stringent internal and external compliance mandates that require proper storage and protection of data and information,” said Gordon Arnold, security software architect and product manager, IBM Tivoli software.  “The integration of Thales Encryption Manager with IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager will provide our customers with the choice between hardware secured and software key management to help them centralize and better manage their storage security processes.”

“We are extremely excited about working with IBM to provide a leading-edge storage encryption key management appliance.  We are committed to providing secure and cost effective key management solutions enabling customers to deploy encryption throughout the enterprise whether at the network, storage or application level. For many, performing encryption within the storage environment is an increasingly attractive proposition but with it come the challenges of scalability, security and resilience,” says Franck Greverie, vice president, managing director for the information systems security activities of Thales. “TEMS successfully embodies a wide range of key management best practices and this new partnership with IBM is further testament to Thales’s commitment to provide encryption key management support for the broadest range of storage encryption endpoints in the market.”

Thales will be both speaking and exhibiting at IBM Pulse 2010, the premier service management event, Las Vegas, Nevada February 21-24, 2010. Visit Thales on Booth #E122.

Bob Lockhart, Senior Solutions Architect at Thales will be speaking at the event about key management standards and the adoption of the recently introduced Key Management Interoperability Protocol on a panel entitled ‘KMIP Standard Adoption – Storage and Beyond’, Monday February 22, 2010.