Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Data Protection

Projections Suggest Rapid Shift to Self-Encrypting Hard Drives Over Next Two Years

Self-encrypting hard drives automatically and continuously encrypt all data in the drive itself, protecting it from loss, theft or attack. This type of technology is becoming more important as we continue to see data loss incidents plague organizations around the world.

Data storage industry analyst Dr. Thomas Coughlin, who has more than 30 years in the data storage industry, this week revealed the industry’s first forecast examining the adoption of self-encrypting drives (SEDs).

Self-encrypting hard drives automatically and continuously encrypt all data in the drive itself, protecting it from loss, theft or attack. This type of technology is becoming more important as we continue to see data loss incidents plague organizations around the world.

Data storage industry analyst Dr. Thomas Coughlin, who has more than 30 years in the data storage industry, this week revealed the industry’s first forecast examining the adoption of self-encrypting drives (SEDs).

Self-Encrypting Hard Drives GrowthCoughlin addressed attendees in an Emerging Technologies session at the NSA Trusted Computing Conference and Expo that took place this week in Orlando.

According to Coughlin’s research:

• By 2013 SED capability will be in over 80 percent of SSDs and likely in almost all SSDs by 2014.

• By 2017, almost all HDDs will include SED capability.

• By 2016 the high, median and low estimates for security adoption for SED HDDs are 411 million, 315 million and 122 million units.

What factors come into play when it comes to deployment of SEDs? Coughlin notes that a number of factors will foster adoption. These include cost parity of SEDs to non-self encrypting storage devices; no performance impact on individual systems with SEDs compared to software-based encryption; no performance overhead compared to software encryption running on the host; and possibly longer useful drive life than drives used in a software encrypted system, due to increased reads and writes with SW encryption.

The report also notes additional benefits of SEDs. These include:

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

• The encryption key is stored on the storage device and cannot be accessed through host hacking, which is a typical and common attack on systems with software encryption.

• SEDs are less complex to implement in storage array encryption solutions.

• Increasing legislation and regulations favor the use of SEDs, particularly those with FIPS 140 certification.

Servers and Desktop systems are not the only technology assets that make use of hard drives holding potentially sensitive corporate data. Copiers and printers often utilize hard disks in order to store and process documents, creating another data security risk for information security teams who are already challenged with security and compliance requirements.

Written By

For more than 15 years, Mike Lennon has been closely monitoring the threat landscape and analyzing trends in the National Security and enterprise cybersecurity space. In his role at SecurityWeek, he oversees the editorial direction of the publication and is the Director of several leading security industry conferences around the world.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join the session as we discuss the challenges and best practices for cybersecurity leaders managing cloud identities.

Register

SecurityWeek’s Ransomware Resilience and Recovery Summit helps businesses to plan, prepare, and recover from a ransomware incident.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Application Security

Cycode, a startup that provides solutions for protecting software source code, emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday with $4.6 million in seed funding.

Data Protection

The cryptopocalypse is the point at which quantum computing becomes powerful enough to use Shor’s algorithm to crack PKI encryption.

Artificial Intelligence

The CRYSTALS-Kyber public-key encryption and key encapsulation mechanism recommended by NIST for post-quantum cryptography has been broken using AI combined with side channel attacks.

Compliance

The three primary drivers for cyber regulations are voter privacy, the economy, and national security – with the complication that the first is often...

Data Protection

While quantum-based attacks are still in the future, organizations must think about how to defend data in transit when encryption no longer works.

Application Security

Virtualization technology giant VMware on Tuesday shipped urgent updates to fix a trio of security problems in multiple software products, including a virtual machine...

Application Security

Fortinet on Monday issued an emergency patch to cover a severe vulnerability in its FortiOS SSL-VPN product, warning that hackers have already exploited the...

Cybersecurity Funding

Los Gatos, Calif-based data protection and privacy firm Titaniam has raised $6 million seed funding from Refinery Ventures, with participation from Fusion Fund, Shasta...