The achievement, says Thales, the Long Credon, Oxfordshire-based IT security specialist, means that customers can have the utmost confidence in the firm's range of advanced cryptographic solutions.

"Governments and enterprise businesses face unprecedented challenges in ensuring the confidentiality of data as it is processed and exchanged across data centres and the use of cryptography in the form of encryption offers the most convenient way to protect sensitive data in transit over high-speed backhaul and backbone connections", said Frank Greverie, managing director of information systems security at Thales.

"Thales has long championed best practices and industry standards and Common Criteria certification for our Datacryptor products demonstrates our commitment to achieving internationally recognised standards and compliance requirements".

"It is vital that our customers have a high level of confidence in the products they buy and independent review of a product's security properties is a powerful tool in building that confidence."

The international Common Criteria standard was developed to unify and supersede national IT security certification schemes from several different countries, including the US, Canada, Germany, the UK, France, Australia and New Zealand.

Common Criteria certified solutions are required by governments and enterprises around the world to protect mission-critical infrastructures. Under Common Criteria, a product is evaluated to a specific EAL.

Thales said its high speed optical encryptors are also undergoing certification under the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) level 3.

FIPS is a standard defined by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology and widely adopted as a security benchmark for cryptographic solutions in government and commercial enterprises.