Security or protection of sensitive data travelling or floating over network is always at risk, there are many methods available but finding the right solution to meet the business requirement with assured data security, reduced compliances, cheaper and minimal or no impact in integrating with existing application system is always been challenging & tedious tasks. As far as data protection or security is concerned - the very first thing comes to mind is encryption, but considering the fact that sophisticated attackers or malicious users always go after secret keys used in encryption to retrieve back the original sensitive data. This always pose data breach threat to the application system whenever the transformed or encrypted data travel out of application system. To address this concern a new method "tokenization" is being introduced and is quite popular these days among the institutions/organization dealing with sensitive information of their customers specially in payment domain. There is a fundamental difference between both the available technologies: Encryption protects data by transforming it to unreadable form where as tokenization works on principle of substituting the sensitive data with surrogate or non-sensitive data. This research paper will cover study on both Encryption and Tokenization, finding the right solution to meet the business requirement in protecting the end customer sensitive information, along with this a comparative study of "Encryption vs. Tokenization" based on different parameters are also been captured and also will also uncover & address the performance challenge associated with the token vault based implementation of tokenization. This research paper also outline the solution to address the performance challenge of lookup tables(also called as vaults) with the results showcasing the improved performance and other additional features.

Data security Tokenization Vault token Encryption.