Trusted Computing Group

When the leading storage vendors got together in Trusted Computing Group several years ago to talk about how to create a standard way to protect data, they probably envisioned a world in which lost laptops or drives would not create major news, incur giant fines or trigger massive legislation. Fortunately, that world is a reality, thanks to the hard work of the pioneers of self-encrypting drives. While some not-so-forward thinking organizations still struggle with data protection, there is no excuse NOT to protect data in hardware anymore.

So this week, in homage to the U.S. holiday of Thanksgiving, let's be thankful that most drive vendors now have a self-encrypting hard drive or solid state drive that implements the TCG self-encrypting drive technology. These drives are available for both client systems and for the enterprise. Wait a minute...you thought only Seagate or a few other vendors produced these drives in small quantities, at higher prices? Nope. There are SEDs available from a lot of vendors for only a very small premium - which is expected to disappear in the coming year as demand ramps and quantities of drives shipped increases.

Today, drives supporting TCG's Opal specification for laptop drives are available from Hitachi and its Travelstar product line; Micron and its Real SSD drives; Samsung SSD drives; and Seagate Momentus drives along with drives from Toshiba. Some of these are FIPS certified if that is a concern.

"...Ok, that's fine, but I am a big enterprise. What can you do for me?"  Well, now there are a number of enterprise-class drives supporting TCG's enterprise storage specifications enabling self-encryption. These include Toshbia drives, the Hitachi Ultrastar product line of HDDs and SSDs and a variety of HDDs and SSDs from Seagate including its Constellation, Cheetah, Savvio and Pulsar lines. LSI supports enterprise SEDs in its storage controller cards, the MegaRAID line.

So all of these drives are now available. Where can someone actually get one? Computers with these drives are sold by Dell in its Latitude and Optiplex lines; by HP in it is EliteBook, ProBook, Elite and Pro lines of notebooks and desktops; and in Lenovo's ThinkPad family of notebooks.

Critical to this effort are Marvell and Sandforce, TCG members that support the TCG Opal specification in storage controllers, while ULINK provides software for testing and qualification.

Wondering how these drives can be managed? What about deploying thousands of them across a worldwide enterprise? That's no problem and can be done very easily and quickly now, thanks to multi-vendor support from a number of well-known ISVs, including:

Absolute
CryptoMill
McAfee
Secude
Softex
Sophos
Symantec
Wave
WinMagic

You can get a complete list of available products with links to the manufacturers can be found here. Enjoy the leftover turkey and don't leave your notebook PC with the unencrypted drive anywhere.

* Please note all brands are property of their owners.