IBM has announced a combination of encryption technology and services to improve security and privacy.

The centerpiece of the solution is the introduction of the industry’s first fully encrypting data drive… The open-standards-based drive is designed to protect the data in the event that it is lost or stolen, rendering it unreadable to anyone who finds it… It will also provide customers with the ability to share encrypted tapes with their business partners.

The TS1120 Tape Drive utilizes public key cryptography, although it is not clear if it would make use of existing enterprise PKI or not. It seems to use PKI built into the IBM z/OS operating system. Key management is handled by the IBM Encryption Key Manager for Java.

I’m not sure if I should get excited about this or not.

via Jon Erickson’s DDJ Security blog: IBM: First-of-its-kind encryption?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 7:33 pm by Peter Hesse and is filed under hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.