Disk-drive Encryption Gains Ground

摘要

The Opal industry-standards effort unveiled last week by the Trusted Computing Group should prove a boon to IT professionals exploring desktop encryption options. The Opal Security Subsystem Class Specification 1.0, as it's officially called, offers a set of mechanisms and protocols for diskdrive encryption, authentication, configuration and policy management. Implemented in disk drives and supporting client and security-management software, Opal will provide IT managers with flexibility and interoperability in managing computers using Opal-based encryption. "That's what we expect with this, the ability to mix and match, and we're keeping an eye on it going forward," says Ken Waring, IT director at CBI Heath, the Toronto-based Canadian healthcare provider, which today uses Seagate Technology's embedded disk-drive encryption in Dell computers with Wave Systems management software, to protect sensitive data.