data in motion

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Data in motion, also referred to as data in transit or data in flight, is digital information that is in the process of being transported between locations either within or between computer systems. The term can also be used to describe data within a computer’s random access memory (RAM) that is ready to be read, accessed, updated or processed.

Data in motion includes the following scenarios: data moving from an Internet-capable endpoint device to a web-facing service in the cloud; data moving between virtual machines within and between cloud services and data that is traversing trusted private networks and an untrusted network such and the Internet. Once the data arrives at its final destination, it becomes data at rest.

Because data in motion is vulnerable to man in the middle (MiTM) attacks, it is often encryption to prevent interception. For example, the iSCSI transport layer incorporates IPSec security, which can encrypt data as it is transferred between two devices to prevent a hacker with a sniffer from seeing the contents of that data. IPSec has been used extensively as a transit encryption protocol for virtual private network (VPN) tunnels; it makes use of cryptography algorithms such as Triple DES (3DES) and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Encryption platform software can also be integrated with existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to keep data in motion secure.