Seagate ST9500421AS Seagate Secure™ Technology Enables Robust Securi - Page 2

Seagate Secure™ Technology Enables Robust Security Within the Hard Drive 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 2 3 http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1988728,00.asp