Established in 1900, CSAA offers a wide array of automotive, travel, insurance, and financial services to more than four million members in Northern California, Nevada, and Utah. It is the second largest member organization of the national AAA. Because the organization handles both member and financial data, it is impacted by a broad range of privacy mandates, including state laws such as California's SB1386, requirements from the Department of Motor Vehicles, as well as industry regulations such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.

"CSAA's philosophy is 'members first,' and this principle applies across our IT infrastructure wherever member data is handled. While compliance with PCI and other privacy mandates is a top priority for AAA, it is even more important that our members know their data is securely maintained," said Michael Cassidy, CSAA Security Standards and Compliance officer. "Encryption is the best way to achieve compliance with federal and state laws, and Decru was the clear choice to secure unstructured data in our NAS environments."

As CSAA outlined its compliance requirements, it became apparent that mainframe and database security alone would not address all potential vulnerabilities. CSAA deployed Decru DataFort E-Series appliances as part of an end-to-end data security program to protect all file-based data stored in its NAS environment and leverage the Decru Lifetime Key Management system for automated, secure key archiving and recovery.

"CSAA is well known for its commitment to putting the customer first," said Michele Borovac, director of Marketing for Decru. "Ensuring data privacy is rapidly becoming a key requirement of customer service, and we are pleased to help CSAA lead the way toward true defense in depth for sensitive member data."

Decru provides the industry's only unified platform for securing data at rest across the enterprise. Decru appliances protect the application and storage infrastructure with a layer of wire-speed encryption, authentication, access controls, and enterprise-wide key management. Customers can deploy Decru solutions transparently in NAS, FC SAN, IP SAN, and tape backup environments, with no changes to servers, desktops, applications, or user workflow.