OpenVMS Encryption and Standalone Backups

[Thomas Ritter]

Interesting idea encrypting a system disk. Why bother ? A well set up system disk should be basically read_only. We have all our site specific data on a common disk. Even then only a few directories would need to be encrypted.
Tell me...do you send your tapes offsite in a sealed box ? Do you apply your own seals and ensure that no one tampers with them and if a seal is broken how to deal with such a situation ? How secure are the tapes at the holding place ?

[Ross Smith_1]

We've been told that we're required to have encryption in place that is certified as FIPS 140-2 compliant for protecting our clinical research data. Does VMS's encryption (for backup and encryption at the command line) meet that requirement?

I'm very new to all this, I hope I've formulated the question appropriately.

Thanks!

[Mike Zinni]

Thank you everyone for your responses! Sorry about the delay.

[Jan van den Ende]

@Ross Smith:

>>>
I'm very new to all this, I hope I've formulated the question appropriately.
<<<

So, first of all: WELCOME.

And yes, you formulated it OK, but since it is your question, you should start your own thread.
That way you can get notified of any answers, and you can put value to them.
(but a pointer to this thread certainly will not hurt!

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

[Anton van Ruitenbeek]

Mike,

If you have a multiple site etc. setup for disaster etc. then you will not have the problem of costs for a disk more or less. If you setup your site with a systemdisk, clustercommon datadisk, program disk, other data disks you can backup de systemdisk without encryption because there are no company data on it. De clustercommon data configuration will contain all the specific (not HP) data eq SYSUAF, RIGHTSLIST, ip configuration, AGEN$*-files. So you can restore the systemdisk (including the encryption!) and after that start restoring the other disks.
We do this for a long time and because we are a realy disaster-tollerent environment we didn't have any clusterdowntime and we do backups of the 3rd disk of all the shadowsets (yes we have shadows of three). When we have to regenerate the environment for testing/demo facilities we do use the backups of the productionsite and by this we direct test or the backups are correct and usefull. And all the tests were OK. So its for sure that the backupmethod we use is trustworthy !

AvR

[Mike Zinni]

AVR, Bob, Edgar, Hoff, Sibohan, Steven, Thomas, JPE thank you for all of your responses! I think that I have enough information now to complete this. Much appreciated.