NSA conference attendees want the whole SED package

This week Seagate unveiled its Momentus Self-Encrypting Drive technology at the inaugural NSA Trusted Computing Conference and Exposition, Sept. 14-16. Hosted by the U.S. National Security Agency.

Joni Clark, Seagate’s Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Momentus hard drives is there working the booth, talking to attendees about hard drive based encryption. What is interesting is the responses Joni is getting from attendees. “When I asked these folks what they wanted to see from vendors at this event, many of them said, I’d like to see companies like Seagate, Dell, Intel and Microsoft put all the components together for a complete solution and then tell me where to get it.”

Interesting in that companies like Dell offer encrypted drive options in most of their laptop configurations, so is this a matter of awareness and education?  I think so. Probably one of the reasons Seagate is participating at this show.

But you don’t have to be a government agency, or necessarily purchase a new laptop to get self-encrypting drive technology. Since the encryption is hardware based and is handled at the drive level, a simple laptop upgrade and management software  is all you need. Look at companies like  Wave and Credant – current Seagate partners for full disk encryption.  On the enterprise side, check out what LSI, IBM, and Seagate are saying for Seagate enterprise drives with self-encrypting drive technology.

The question being, at what point does self-encrypting drive technology become as “everyday” as features like NCQ (Native Command Queuing). It’s bound to happen, don’t you think?