Self-Encrypting Drives Soon To Be The Norm

Many small businesses risk enormous expense if they have to notify customers or employees of lost or compromised data. It's one reason more and more hard drive and solid state drive products will have self-encryption capabilities built in, storage industry experts say.

"We've seen this coming over time: Based on the Trusted Computing Group's standard, hard drives and solid state drives (SSD), are offering self-encryption built-in. The key difference with these next-generation encrypted drives is that these units have the encryption integrated into a single chip on drive in the drive.

Securing data storage is especially important for small businesses, due to legal specifications that require companies to report breaches, and to maintain data for long periods of time for accountability purposes."