Chris Bjorklund: You’re listening to the AllBusiness podcast. I’m Chris Bjorklund. If you’re getting this through iTunes and RSS feed or an online streaming-media player, you can hear interviews with other experts at AllBusiness.com.

Bjorklund: One way to secure your office’s computer network is through encryption. What is it? Here’s more from Matt Sarrell, IT consultant and executive director of Sarrell Group and AllBusiness.com’s Paul Kilduff.

Paul Kilduff: Describe encryption. What are you actually doing?

Matt Sarrell: With encryption, you are exchanging a key that is then used to perform a complex mathematical operation to encrypt or scramble the data that is being sent across the wire or across the radio waves. This is very much like if you were to think about maybe passing notes as a kid and using a code or you know, you doing some kind of communications during wartime, using ciphers, things like that. So basically what it is now is they can harness the power of computers to do much, much more complicated calculations, almost to the point where it’s almost a trivial amount of computing power that’s needed. So it’s basically scrambling, taking the legitimate data that used to be on your screen, scrambling it, sending it over the wire to another computer which already has the key and can use that key to unscramble it, process it, rescramble it, send it back, you unscramble it and run it.

Kilduff: So physically, what does it look like? Does it look like alphabet soup to someone who’s trying to pick up on your network?

Sarrell: Yeah, it would just look like garbage. It would just look like gobbledygook. You couldn’t make any sense of it. You would see technically speaking, if you were sniffing the network and there was encrypted traffic on it, you would see the header information so you would know which two computers were communicating, but you would not be able to read the data in any meaningful way.

Bjorklund: Matt Sarrell is an AllBusiness blogger and founder of Sarrell Group. Thanks for listening to this AllBusiness podcast.