Importance of Self Encrypting Drives (SED)

It is always observed that data compromise and breach can lead to strong fines for potential compliance violations and high-profile public disclosure embarrassment resulting in huge financial losses. These financial losses and data can be easily protected with strong encryption on the hard drive. This mitigates the risk of financial losses and is always on top priority for any organization. This actually reveals why should any organization actually go for SED rather than a standard hard drive.

A recent article about a BP employee losing a laptop containing personal data of thousands of Louisiana residents who filed for claims for compensation after the Gulf oil spill. Even though the laptop was password protected, the data was not encrypted. Now, this data security breach could be avoided if the stolen laptop had a TCG Opal or a Seagate DriveTrust Self Encrypting Drive (SED) instead of a standard hard drive with unencrypted data that’s on most corporate notebooks. As we all know, data compromise and breach can lead to strong fines for potential compliance violations and high-profile public disclosure embarrassment resulting in huge financial losses.

Benefits of SED

Significant performance improvement:

• Encryption hardware integrated into the drive controller, allows the drive to operate at full data rate with no performance degradation.
• Scalable solution - every drive contains encryption engine.

Highly secure solution:

• The encryption on the drive is always on – assists with regulatory compliance requirements.
• Encryption keys are generated in the drive and never leave the drive.
• User authentication is performed by the drive before it will unlock at Pre-Boot Authentication (PBA), independent of the operating system.

Increased efficiencies due to ease of deployment and use:

• Encryption is transparent to both users and software.
• Lowers time for large scale deployments that can save hours of set up time for the end users.

Lower overall TCO – Total Cost of Ownership:

• Eliminates the need of complex infrastructure needed for managing the encryption keys.
• Requires No modifications to OS, applications or tools.
• Crypto-erase provides instant drive repurposing / decommissioning.

Self-Encrypting Drives in the Marketplace:

• The PC OEMs will soon launch notebooks with SEDs as a standard.
• Price delta versus a standard hard drive will go down to almost zero over time as volumes ramp up.

Softex SecureDrive Single Sign On (SSO) capability allows users to authenticate simultaneously to unlock the hard disk encryption and to boot into the Windows desktop. SecureDrive also allows administrators to remotely perform a secure erase of the data from the drive to simplify PC end of life processing. It protects the Self Encrypted Drive (SED) using strong authentication such as biometric fingerprint device at Pre-Boot Authentication (PBA) as well as provides centralized manageability to the enterprise.