"Exactly what data do we have to encrypt, and how?" That's a common question posed by IT and legal departments, HR and customer service managers, CIOs and information security professionals. In the past, they made their own choices about encryption, balancing the risks of compromised data against the costs of encryption. Those costs are measured not merely by expense but also by increased processing load, user-unfriendliness, and the remote but real possibility of lost or corrupted decryption keys resulting in inaccessible data. After weighing the costs and benefits, most enterprises decided against encryption for all but the most sensitive applications and data categories.