During an internal security audit, a junior analyst reviews a file server that hosts quarterly financial reports. The files reside on encrypted disks and are only accessed during month-end processing; at all other times they remain idle on the storage array. In which data state are the reports while they are simply sitting on the disks?
Data at rest describes digital information that has reached a stable storage location-such as a hard disk, backup tape, or cloud bucket-and is not currently moving across a network or being manipulated in memory by a running process. Because the data is static, security efforts focus on storage-centric controls like full-disk or file-level encryption, strict access permissions, and physical safeguards for the media. Data in use applies to information actively processed in RAM or CPU registers, whereas data in transit (sometimes called data in motion) refers to information being transmitted between systems. Volatile memory data is not a formal data state but an informal reference to RAM contents.
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How is data at rest different from data in motion?
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What are the commonly used encryption methods for securing data at rest?
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