Trusted Computing Group

In a webcast hosted by Trusted Computing Group, Dr. Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates talked in some detail about findings associated with new research his firm conducted the last few months on the potential market for self-encrypting drives (SEDs).

Coughlin's findings note that by 2017, all HDDs will be capable of self encryption and by 2016, most SSDs will be self-encrypting as well. In the shorter term, Coughlin notes that by 2013, 80 percent of SSDs will be self-encrypting. He noted that most major drive vendors, including Seagate, Fujitsu, Micron, Samsung and others now ship SEDs - either HDDs, SSDs or both. Several vendors now offer enterprise drives that are SEDs.

As to why the drive industry is adopting SEDs, Coughlin noted a number of factors. These include price parity of SED drives versus those without the capability; growing requirements for data protection enforced by state and federal regulations; and the availability of drives supporting FIPS-140 and in parallel, demand from government users. Coughlin noted that while most drives will offer SED capability, not all will be used for data protection. However, TCG believes that the adoption of such drives to secure date will be become increasingly widespread as additional management tools become widely available and as the number of laws mandating data protection increase. For example, a federal data breach bill is now under consideration by U.S. lawmakers, and much existing regulation provides a safe harbor for companies using SED technology.

Elsewhere in the world of storage, one-time TCG storage expert Dr. Michael Willett of Samsung, along with a number of other experts, will address attendees at next week's Storage Network World (SNW). This established event, chock-full of presentations ranging from our favorite topic of data encryption to cloud storage to solid state drive topics, has long provided credible and professionally vetted material on emerging and current developments in storage with a focus on the enterprise. Dr. Willett will host a tutorial, "Implementing Stored Data Encryption," with an emphasis on the role of standards-based self-encrypting drives and their deployment and management. Other talks will dive into other issues related to that topic. Learn more about this event, click here.

To see the archived Coughlin webcast and to view a summary of the report and additional information, please click here.