Drives Based on TCG Specifications Becoming Standard as Companies Join Forces in Drive Trust Alliance to Continue Adoption and Awareness

PORTLAND, Ore., Nov. 12, 2015 – One hundred percent of new solid state drives targeted to enterprises and the office, along with all new enterprise (SATA) storage devices, encrypt data constantly to protect against breaches and attacks. These self-encrypting drives, or SEDs) are based on specifications created by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) and its members.
To further promote awareness of these drives and their always-on encrypting capability, TCG has joined with industry members in supporting the Drive Trust Alliance (DTA). The Drive Trust Alliance was formed in 2015 by both Bright Plaza, Inc. and Coughlin Associates to help promote awareness and adoption of self-encrypting drive technology in the consumer market.
Noted Tom Coughlin, storage industry analyst and president, Coughlin Associates, “While standards like this typically take time to penetrate the market, the urgency of the security problem and the widely available SED options mean that device makers and enterprise users don’t have to make a choice between non-SEDs and SEDs: SED technology is available now in most storage devices. The growing adoption of SEDs, evidenced in the almost one billion SEDs now deployed, demonstrates that this technology is among the proven solutions against data loss and attacks.”
TCG recently released a number of updates to its TCG SED specifications. SEDs provide:

• Ease of use: encryption is an integral part of the drive electronics
• Transparency: drives are always encrypting; users cannot turn off encryption
• Performance: SEDs operates at full drive speeds with no impact on drive performance
• Efficacy: SEDs are a mature and time-tested technology vetted by storage vendors and related suppliers
• Scalability: SEDs are proven to scale smoothly from individual use to the largest distributed data centers in the world

Jason Cox, TCG Storage Work Group chairman, will join a panel of storage and encryption experts January 4 at the Storage Visions Conference to talk about data protection and SEDs, where TCG and DTA will demonstrate how SEDs protect data continuously with no user intervention and without impact on drive or system performance. Members also will demonstrate SEDs with members of the DTA. A discount for early registration ends Dec. 25.

About TCG
TCG is a not-for-profit organization formed to develop, define and promote open, vendor-neutral, global industry standards, supportive of a hardware-based root of trust, for interoperable trusted computing platforms. More information about TCG is available at trustedcomputinggroup.org. Follow TCG on Twitter and on LinkedIn.