Self-Encrypting Drives: Simple, Yet Powerful

Data security is top of mind for most businesses trying to respond to the constant barrage of news highlighting data theft, security breaches, and the resulting punitive costs. Combined with litigation risks, compliance issues and pending legislation, companies face a myriad of technology and products that all claim to protect data-at-rest on storage devices. The drive industry has standardized and is now deploying, innovative, simple yet powerful technology intended to secure data where it lives – in storage. This tutorial will give storage users and managers a look at emerging drive-level self-encryption technology (both HDD and SSD) from notebook PCs to the data center that provides a more secure storage foundation and compare that technology with alternate storage encryption methods, including: host-based, appliance, network fabric, and controller-based. Self-encryption will be compared to software-based encryption in several aspects, including performance. Independent side-by-side performance testing of both HDDs and SSDs demonstrates dramatically the superior read/write/startup capabilities of self-encrypting drives.

Learning Objectives

Appreciate the business requirement for data encryption
Understand the technology of self-encryption
Compare self-encryption to software-based encryption