Understanding data encryption

One of the first, if not the first, encryption devices to be created was the Enigma machine. It was invented in the 1920s and was mostly known for its usage in World War II to encrypt messages. The British scientist Alan Turing and his team managed to crack the encryption code after 6 months of hard work.

The encryption that Enigma used in those days was very advanced. The principle is still the same – we translate data into something that can't be read without knowing how the data was translated. To be able to read the data, we need a way to decipher or decrypt the data. There are two ways to encrypt data – asymmetric, or public key, and symmetric. In the next section, we will briefly explain these encryption technologies, before diving into the services that the leading cloud providers offer in terms of securing data.

Encryption uses an encryption algorithm and an encryption key – symmetric or asymmetric. With symmetric...