It’s hard to believe that it’s been 10 years since we brought the first version of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) to the IBM i platform (then known as the AS/400). I remember a conversation I had early on with Phil Zimmerman about the future of encryption and of PGP itself. At the time Phil was under investigation by the US government over the export of strong encryption. Those were the days when strong encryption was considered “munitions” and subject to export restrictions.
Phil was very upbeat about the future of PGP, despite the obvious challenges, and was confident that one day Enterprise environments would see the benefits of protecting all types of sensitive data. He encouraged me to pursue a commercial version of PGP and lent his support to the idea. We released the first version of PGP for the IBM i in early 1999.
PGP encryption is now in wide use across all types of industries to protect sensitive data. Healthcare organizations use it to protect patient data and medical claims. Retailers use it to protect credit card information and to send data to their banks to prevent check fraud. Banks and insurance companies use PGP to protect customer social security numbers and other private information. And companies across the spectrum use PGP to protect payroll information and bank transfers.
We are now starting to release the newest version of PGP – PGP Command Line 9 – in our Alliance All-Ways Secure product. PGP Command Line 9 has lots of new features including support for advanced encryption methods, integration with PGP Universal Key Server, more target platforms for Self-Decrypting Archives, and much more. Our existing All-Ways Secure customers can upgrade to PGP Command Line 9 for free.
Alliance All-Ways Secure gives you several methods for secure FTP transfer of your PGP encrypted files. You can use SSL FTP to achieve an encrypted transfer, or you can use SSH Secure FTP (sFTP). In either case you combine the security of PGP encryption with the encryption of the actual transfer. Both SSL FTP and Secure Shell sFTP come with full automation features.
Bottom line, you have many options for file encryption. But because we’re no longer living in the 1990s, NOT encrypting is no longer an option. A data loss can have a devastating impact on your company, and PGP encryption is proven technology to help prevent that loss.