Datto's SIRIS Gets New Encryption Technology

By SEOService47

Looking to quell corporate concern that may have been raised by news of the NSA government surveillance program, data backup and disaster recovery vendor Datto has announced new encryption technology for its SIRIS BDR and business continuity solution.

The company is making its new encryption system available this week in the SIRIS solution. It’s designed so that only the MSP or customer holds the decryption key. And since Datto doesn’t have this key, Datto cannot turn it over to the U.S. National Security Administration (NSA), even if ordered by a court of law.

That’s a big deal given revelations that companies such as Google, Microsoft and AT&T have been compelled to turn over customer information to the NSA. Other vendors, such as highly secure email provider Lavabit, have chosen to shut down their businesses to protect customer privacy, and implied that NSA scrutiny led to the action.

Datto developer and encryption/authentication specialist Dan Fuhry designed the system to make it virtually impossible for anyone to access data without the keyholder’s permission.

“I’m writing this to personally guarantee to you that anything you consider a threat, we do too, and we have designed our products accordingly,” he said in a blog post. “We will stand firm in our commitment to protect you and your customers.”

The key used to encrypt the data is the master key, and the master key is only ever stored in an encrypted fashion, he said in a blog post.  Here’s how he describes the system:

“It’s completely random – not derived from a passphrase – and no human ever sees it. When you enter your passphrase, your Datto device does some number crunching on that passphrase and some additional data to get a user key. That user key is used to decrypt an encrypted copy of the master key. This gives you the ability to change your passphrase without having to re-encrypt the entire dataset, and have multiple valid passwords per agent.”

Datto has made the encryption technology available in is SIRIS solution starting Nov. 11.