Tuesday, 31 October 2006

Seagate Debuts Fully Encrypted HDDs for Notebooks

Seagate is all set to introduce a new security platform that aims to deliver a cost- effective way to deploy security for computing systems, computer electronics and mobile devices by protecting data on the hard disc drive, the company said.

The platform, Seagate DriveTrust Technology, is said to combine automated hardware-based security with a programming foundation that makes it easy to add security-based software applications for organisation-wide encryption key management, multi-factor user authentication and other capabilities that help lock down digital information at rest, the company continued.

According to Seagate, DriveTrust Technology offers the following benefits:

• With DriveTrust Technology, secure hard drives are as easy to install and operate as standard drives. The security capabilities run transparently within the drive with no need for additional configuration. Set up can be as simple as creating a password for user authentication.
• Drive-level security requires no patches, updates or upgrades, eliminating many of the costs associated with traditional software solutions. DriveTrust Technology hard drives free IT organisations from having to distribute software updates or manage software versions, ensuring consistent and reliable security for data at rest.
• Information stored on DriveTrust Technology drives can be instantly erased, making it easy to re-deploy and retire the drives and reducing the time and costs traditionally associated with overwriting and erasing disc data.
• DriveTrust Technology gives Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) a platform for building stronger security applications. The DriveTrust Technology Software Developer Kit (SDK) includes the documentation and tools necessary to build DriveTrust Technology-enabled applications such as access controls needed to manage encryption keys, passwords and other forms of authentication for large deployments.