Barclays' encryption locks down £500bn

Barclays is streamlining how it protects the corporate information that helps it carry out £500bn worth of transactions every day.

The bank is rolling out enterprise-wide encryption and installing key management servers at its data centres worldwide, according to the bank's director of electronic protection and investigations Richard Horne.

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Speaking at the Gartner IT Security Summit in London, Horne said that large companies needed to bite the bullet and adopt an enterprise-wide encryption system, where all the keys needed to access protected data are held centrally.

He added that the move away from a patchwork of mismatched encryption products was helping Barclays face the challenge confronting all large organisations - how to protect an unprecedented amount of information without making it inaccessible.

Horne said: "Data has started flowing in a way that it never has done before.

"There has been a real explosion in the need to protect data and what is the mass deployment of encryption across an organisation to protect critical data.

"If encryption is going to scale up then you have got to have central control of those keys.

"Key management servers have to be available across the global estate and we are building them in all of our data centres around the world."

Horne added that by relying instead on a hotchpotch of incompatible encryption products businesses are exposing themselves to a greater risk of data breaches or information being rendered inaccessible through mismanaged encryption keys.