Seagate is to build automatic encryption into all its enterprise hard drives, the company announced at Storage Expo 2007 in London. All enterprise drives will be fitted with Seagate"s Full Disk Encryption (FDE) as standard.
The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) is designing a security protocol for the drives, and the IEEE 1619.3 Key Management Subcommittee is setting up a management standard to ensure interoperability. Seagate"s move is in response to growing UK government pressure for better data security practices in the industry. Making drive encryption automatic has already been recommended by the US National Security Agency (NSA).