Any business using data wants to protect its information, keep it away from prying eyes and secure it in line with laws and regulations like GDPR.
Cryptography is very important in this regard to modern, digital business. But what exactly is it, and what has it got to do with the encryption we see mentioned in most business services and digital products?
Cryptography is defined by Kaspersky as “the study of secure communications techniques that allow only the sender and intended recipient of a message to view its contents.”
The practice of cryptography has been keeping nations’ secrets safe for millennia, creating a never-ending battle between cryptologists and those trying to break the codes. Perhaps most famously culminating in Germany’s Enigma machine that battled the scientific brains at Bletchley Park in World War 2.
In the digital age, almost any message we send, or transaction we make, uses cryptography to create an encryption that is very hard to break. But with billions of messages flying across business networks, today’s cryptography needs to be fast. And, with very high-speed computers capable of cracking very complex codes, they need to be secure enough to resist digital attempts to crack them.