Tape encryption: An obvious gap for Sun/StorageTek?
(http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23702)
Column “Comply with me, comply, come fly away...”
By Ambrose McNevin: Friday 03 June 2005, 13:36
MIND THE GAP. Scott McNealy’s hints that his shopping spree isn’t over has led to much speculation about what Sun will buy next.
In the storage sector there are certainly plenty of companies to chose from. VentureOne, a Dow Jones owned research company says that $5.8 billion has been pumped into 142 storage hardware companies since 1999.
That’s a lot of investment looking for a return.
But for all the potential of hierarchical data management services, virtualization solutions, SAN management promises, NAS/SAN interoperability and lifecycle management solutions based on all the latest protocols and non-existent standards being pushed, perhaps an obvious gap is yet to be filled.
Devices to secure so called data at rest appear to be gaining traction in the market.
Tape encryption has been around for a while but there have been some stirrings in the market of late.
Yesterday IBM signed a deal with Decru, a tape encryption vendor which supplies kit which sits in front of the tape drive and encrypts the data before it gets there.
Elsewhere a UK small player in this market DISUK is expanding into Europe and looking for resellers to punt its aptly named Paranoia 2 tape encryption device at.
The IBM deal comes just a couple of months after Decru signed a similar deal with, yes, StorageTek for the same DataFort range of devices to run with StorageTek’s tape drives.
The logic that there is always a risk that boxes of tapes being moved from one office to another are prone to being lost or stolen and that the information on those tapes should be encrypted is sound.
Remember the Bank of America debacle which came to light in February when the bank admitted that a tape containing credit card records of US politicians and more than 1 million US government workers went walkabout.
Probably inspired by this, Decru points out that a single backup tape could easily store every credit card number in the world.
In the current climate of paranoia it is not too fanciful to suggest that a similar high profile security breach, especially one that directly affects them, might well lead to legislators demanding a law that all tape stored sensitive information, such as security, financial or health records be encrypted.
As users scrambled to comply it would be interesting to watch the offers fly. µ |
