Cisco and RSA have teamed up to develop encryption technology for data-at-rest on tapes and other types of storage media, combined with key management within storage area network infrastructure.

With "Storage Media Encryption", the two companies plan to combine Cisco Storage Media Encryption with RSA Key Manager to monitor both encrypted media and keys.

Cisco and RSA claim Storage Media Encryption technology will help customers meet "various regulatory and privacy requirements" by helping to ensure that confidential information is not compromised if a storage tape or disk is lost or stolen.

"RSA and Cisco are working together to simplify the deployment and management of encryption in the storage area network [SAN] fabric, which will greatly reduce the complexity and disruption that businesses are struggling with today," said Dennis Hoffman, chief strategy officer at RSA.

Cisco will integrate Storage Media Encryption into Cisco-based SAN fabrics for data encryption management across various types of storage devices, including disks, tapes and virtual tape libraries. Data will be encrypted within the network fabric, allowing information encryption on media such as legacy tapes and disks.

The upcoming technology will also support an open API (application programming interface) for key management.

Tom Espiner reported for ZDNet UK from London