Pat Townsend’s Encryption Solution Certified Across All Major Platforms

June 19, 2007 Alex Woodie

Patrick Townsend & Associates is best known for its i5/OS encryption offering. But did you know that the company makes encryption software for other platforms, too? Yesterday, Pat Townsend announced that its Alliance AES Encryption software has been certified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)–the agency that governs the AES standard–to run on Windows, Linux, Unix, and z/OS, in addition to i5/OS.

Pat Townsend’s Alliance AES is a utility that enables users to encrypt and decrypt their data. On the i5/OS platform, the product supports the encryption of a range of data types, including whole DB2 files, individual fields, spool files, save files, and entire tapes, and provides a key management utility. The product is not quite as full featured on AIX, Solaris, Linux, and Windows, where it’s relegated to encrypting database columns (fields), but lacks the key management and logging functions of Alliance AES on i5/OS.

While Pat Townsend’s main platform of focus is i5/OS, that doesn’t mean it’s not important to offer a broad support for other platforms and databases with a single security tool. According to Paul Ohmart, Pat Townsend’s project manager for the NIST certification, data encryption is always about cross-platform compatibility. “Enterprise customers don’t want to send sensitive information in the clear between internal servers, or between their internal systems and external customer and supplier systems,” he says. “This exposes the data to loss. By supplying certified encryption solutions on Windows, Linux, UNIX, iSeries, and zSeries platforms with the same encryption API set, we provide customers with cross-platform support using exactly the same APIs.”

The NIST’s testing process ensures that cross-platform compatibility, says Patrick Townsend, president of the Seattle-area company. “By certifying Alliance AES encryption on all key sizes and modes of encryption, and on all of the major Enterprise server platforms, we provide the confidence that our customers need in an encryption solution,” he says.

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