indirect costs (lost productivity), and opportunity
costs (customer loss and customer recruitment).
Organizations dealing with lost or stolen personal
information face dwindling public trust, especially
as more laws and regulations mandate the public
disclosure of security breaches.
In a study conducted by global IT service provider
Computer Sciences, chief financial officers
rated information security as their top priority.
3
The need for tighter security has increased as
technology matures, becomes more complex,
and reveals additional vulnerabilities. What’s
more, the need for security escalates with the
proliferation of critical data on mobile devices and
notebook computers, which are easy targets for
theft and are easily lost. Compounding the risk,
compromising the passwords and authentication
schemes for these devices is by no means a
challenging task for the technically savvy.
In recent years, the U.S. government has
enacted security and privacy legislation aimed
at protecting personal data. Compliance is
mandatory and requires organizations to secure
access to data and to securely dispose of
electronic files at the end of the data lifecycle.
Meeting expectations of the public—and
complying with government legislation—requires
organizations to scrutinize current security
infrastructures and policies. Remarkably, only 20
percent of the chief financial officers interviewed
in the Computer Sciences study claimed to be
“highly satisfied” with their security technologies.
One well-publicized case of compromised
security was that of the U.S. Veterans
Administration, which experienced the theft of
a laptop computer with extensive, confidential
records of veteran’s personal information.
Although the computer was recovered, the
risk was deemed high enough for the Veterans
Administration to request US$160 million in
funding for credit monitoring necessitated by
compromised information—an extremely high
cost incurred by a single incident.
Traditional Security Options
Organizations have many options for deploying
information security on desktop computers, at
the server, inside the corporate network and on
the Internet. The cost of implementing security
extends beyond purchase and installation to
include maintenance, upgrades, support and
testing costs. For organizations with limited
resources, these direct and indirect costs, and the
logistics of deploying security, can be daunting.
Other common concerns related to security
implementation include:
•
Multiple, unintegrated point solutions.
Organizations must choose various safety
measures to protect their incoming, outgoing
and stored data. These solutions can be highly
complicated to implement, lack integration,
and impose significant resource requirements.
The combination of these factors can result in
vulnerabilities that may be unknown until
a failure or security breach occurs.
•
Performance impact. Some security software
applications consume system resources such
as processing power and system memory
to perform encryption or to manage data.
This resource draw can slow overall system
performance.
•
Lack of extended data access controls. Once
software-based security, such as a password,
has been breached, there’s typically a clear
path to data on the hard drive. Most solutions
don’t secure the data where the data resides,
on the drive.
Benefits of Seagate Secure Technology
Seagate redefines the role of the hard drive
through Seagate Secure technology. With
hardware-based full disk encryption built in,
Seagate Secure hard drives automatically and
transparently protect confidential information.
Self-encrypting hard drives provide the robust
security needed to comply with data security
measures. In addition, Seagate Secure technology
provides a development platform for independent
software vendors (ISVs) to create more robust
applications that can manage security functions
or interoperate with secure storage.
Hard drives provide the perfect infrastructure
for data security:
•
Secure computing environment. A hard
drive’s CPU, storage and firmware manage
Seagate Secure
™
Technology Enables
Robust Security Within the Hard Drive
2
3 http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1988728,00.asp
