I worked in a place that had a very nice in-house blade server setup with an attached NAS, which was encrypted (at rest, on storage). This was early in the “cl

I worked in a place that had a very nice in-house blade server setup with an attached NAS, which was encrypted (at rest, on storage). This was early in the “cloud” epoch and at any rate they preferred in-house iron for entirely understandable reasons. Also, they needed to do some pretty interesting things, so they had a NAS populated with enterprise-grade SSDs and a native AES-based encryption scheme. This kept the key on what was basically a glorified USB key. (For those of you who wish to know these details, the network between the blades and between the blades and the NAS was a nicely spec’d fibre channel network, and there was some iSCSI involved. The blades featured Itanium processors, which kind of gives the manufacturer away, and the firm had invested quite heavily in producing very high-performance code for those ill-fated microprocessors, but I digress.) So... it happened that somebody lost the USB key. Well, not quite. Somebody took it home during a weekend (whilst the system was shut down) and their kid used it for school work. This proved to be a “significant problem”. There was a backup, and it was encrypted and stored on an adjacent SAN. It wasn’t exactly stale, but it wasn’t entirely pristine either. There was much woe and gnashing of teeth. Nobody was fired because the dolt who maintained custody of the only USB key was the founder/CEO, so he couldn’t exactly blame himself. But, yeah. That happened, sadly.