Seagate Shipped One Million Hardware Encryption HDDs

Seagate Technology LLC has shipped more than 1 million self-encrypting laptop and enterprise hard drives.

Sales of the Seagate hard drives with built-in encryption continue to surge as more computer makers offer the drives to protect against unauthorized access to sensitive data, more independent software vendors team up with Seagate to provide the management capabilities required for company-wide installations of self-encrypting laptop PCs, and more of the drives win U.S. government certifications:

• Six original equipment manufacturers – Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, LSI and NetApp – now offer products powered by Seagate enterprise self-encrypting drives (SEDs). All told, Seagate now ships 24 products in a family of enterprise drives that includes Savvio, Cheetah, Constellation ES and Constellation SEDs.
• Dell, Lenovo and Panasonic are shipping or qualifying standard-sized or thin laptops with Seagate Momentus and Momentus Thin SEDs as optional features.
• Seagate’s independent software vendor (ISV) partnerships have grown to include security companies Credant, McAfee, Mobile Armor, Secude, Softex, Symantec, Wave Systems and WinMagic. With management software from these providers, organizations can manage and protect encryption keys and passwords to simplify deployments of Momentus and Momentus Thin SEDs.
• Seagate’s family of Savvio, Cheetah, Constellation and Momentus SEDs have secured FIPS 140-2 certification from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This government certification clears the way for deployments of Seagate self-encrypting drives by all U.S. and Canadian federal agencies, many state and local governments, and regulated industries such as healthcare, finance and defense required to use FIPS-certified gear to help protect sensitive data on PCs and computer networks and in data centers. The Seagate laptop and enterprise hard drives are the first with native encryption to earn the FIPS certification.

Dell and Panasonic now offer laptops featuring FIPS-certified Momentus SEDs. Several major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are now qualifying Momentus SEDs that are compliant with the Trusted Computing Group’s Opal specification. The Trusted Computing Group, an international body that promotes open standards for computer security, issued the Opal specification in 2009. The specification is focused on enabling the ecosystem for self-encrypting drives and increasing their adoption.

Seagate enterprise SED shipments have tripled over the past two quarters, while the company’s laptop SED shipments have doubled in each of the past three years.

"Companies and government organizations worldwide increasingly are securing confidential information on self-encrypting hard drives, recognizing that this commonsense yet powerful approach simplifies the deployment of security for data at rest," said Charles Kolodgy, research director of security products for analyst group IDC. "As storage and security continue to converge, solutions like Seagate’s self-encrypting hard drives are leading the way by providing organizations with the strong, easy-to-use security they need to protect their data assets."

Seagate Enterprise Self-Encrypting Drives
Deliver Government-Grade Security
Seagate offers a lineup of enterprise SED options within its Savvio, Cheetah, and Constellation families. Strong enough for national security, yet easy enough for the one-person IT department, Seagate enterprise SEDs simplify decommissioning and preserve hardware value for returns and repurposing by eliminating the need to overwrite or physically destroy the drive, securing warranty and expired lease returns, and enabling drives to be repurposed securely.

Laptop Lockdown
with Momentus Self-Encrypting Drives
Momentus SEDs give organizations of all sizes a way to protect against unauthorized access to data on notebook PCs and a tool for complying with the growing number of data privacy laws calling for the protection of consumer information using government-grade encryption. The AES encryption chip in the Momentus SEDs automatically and transparently encrypts all drive data. The 2.5-inch drive also eliminates disk initialization and configuration required by encryption software, allows IT administrators to instantly erase all data cryptographically so the drive can be quickly and easily redeployed, and delivers full inline-speed encryption with no impact to system performance.

Momentus SEDs keep all security keys and cryptographic operations within the drive, separating them from the operating system to provide greater protection against hacking and tampering than traditional software alternatives, which can give thieves backdoor access to encryption keys and are otherwise more vulnerable to key theft. Momentus SEDs are offered in capacities up to 500GB.