News & Reviews

Updates from F, Y Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

• 

  Origin Storage 16:42 on 27/05/2010 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Hard Drives ( 7 ), SSD ( 8 )   

  Solid State Drive technology taking off as enterprise users adopt the technology says Origin Storage 

  According to Andy Cordial, managing director with Origin Storage, the report from Objective Analysis – entitled `Enterprise SSDs: Technologies & Markets’ – predicts that the market for enterprise SSDs will grow from 150,000 units in the current year to more than 4.1 million units by the time 2015 rolls around.

  “That’s a growth rate of 90 per cent per annum, which will complemented by a annual revenue growth rate of 55 per cent, which reflects the rapid take-up and the falling prices that we are continuing to see in the SSD marketplace,” he said.

  “If you delve into the report, you find that the magnetic hard drive market is predicted to shrink considerably over the next five years, with the slack being more than taken up by SSD technology,” he added.

  The managing director of the storage systems integration specialist says that the report’s conclusions that the falling price of flash memory is helping to reduce the price of SSDs parallels his observations in what has become a fast-moving marketplace.

  SSDs, he explained, have many benefits in the enterprise and SAN marketplace, not the least of which is their ability to handle more data at much lower latencies than their magnetic counterparts.

  When you factor in these advantages with the take-up of transaction processing systems which, as the report says, are experiencing healthy growth at the moment – a situation that is expected to continue for the foreseeable future – you can see why volumes and revenues are taking off at the moment.

  “It’s interesting that the report notes that SSDs – in the enterprise market at least – are still in their infancy. The growth we are observing in the market is incredible, as we’re also seeing firms such as Intel and Kingston releasing SSDs in lower capacities of around the 30 gigabyte mark, allowing them to be used as boot drives,” he said.

  “This significantly speeds the boot-up cycle for those applications where speed of recovery from a power-down is of importance. Add in the speed advantages that SSDs offer in the transaction processing environment and it’s no small wonder that the market for the technology is taking off,” he added.

  Share/Bookmark
   

  Reply Cancel reply

  Required fields are marked *

  Name *

  Email *

  Website

  

• 

  Origin Storage 16:35 on 07/05/2010 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Computer Security ( 12 ), Data Backup ( 14 ), Data Breach ( 24 ), Data Encryption ( 43 ), Data Locker ( 20 ), Data Loss ( 16 ), Data Protection ( 16 ), Data protection Act ( 15 ), Data Protection Law ( 14 ), Data Protections ( 11 ), Data Recovery ( 11 ), Data Security ( 32 ), Data Storage ( 23 ), Encryption ( 32 ), Enigma ( 14 ), Enigma SED ( 19 ), Information Security ( 12 ), IT Security ( 13 ), Portable Data Storage ( 11 ), Portable Hard Drive ( 15 ), Security Data ( 11 )   

  Laptop users need to raise their encryption game 

  The steady stream of advances in brute force decryption techniques – which started when Russia’s Elcomsoft released the first versions of its Password Recovery suite of `utilities’ around 18 months ago – means that laptop users must now raise their game when it comes to encryption, says Origin Storage.

  And, says Andy Cordial, the storage systems integration firm’s managing director, as Russian password decryption specialist Elcomsoft’s advances clearly show, it can only be a matter of time before further advances are possible.

  “Elcomsoft’s Password Suite shows how it possible to dramatically speed up the rate at which an application crunches its way through password combinations using advanced hardware techniques,” he said.

  “You only have to look at some of the latest software from Elcomsoft, such as Advanced PDF Password Recovery to realise that it’s now possible to recover a 40-bit RC4 password-coded Adobe PDF file in a matter of minutes,” he said.

  “And if you look at the specification of this package, you begin to realise that certain types of AES encryption are also starting to become crackable, although you are currently talking about the kind of processing power that only governments and large corporations have access to,” he added.

  According to the Origin Storage MD, it is only a matter of time before some coding genius moves the password recovery game on a few more stages, making a lot of encryption technologies on laptops just a few years old, infinitely more crackable.

  “Can the man in the street do this? No, but the man in the testing lab can, and cybercriminals clearly now have access to parallel processing and advanced decryption technologies.

  It’s not inconceivable that criminal gangs have cracked weaker AES crypto technologies already and are waiting for an opportunity to try out their skills,” he said.

  So what should laptop users do to defend their data?

  Cordial advises users to take a multi-layered strategy to their data encryption by installing the most powerful levels of AES encryption that are currently commercially available and add on an additional layer of defence such as a passphrase security system or a biometric scanner.

  Some of the latest laptops already offer fingerprint scanners as optional extras, although Cordial says that users should be selective as to which biometric applications they use to protect their data.

  Passphrase protection is another valuable extra layer of defence that can be deployed in parallel with encryption. Origin’s own Data Locker Pro range of PIN-encrypted portable hard drives are a classic example of this dual-layer security strategy, he explained.

  “Users of legacy laptops that want to move on up to the benefits of encrypted drives, meanwhile, should look at the Enigma range of secure encrypted drives that we launched at the Infosecurity Europe show late last month,” he said.

  “These kits, which start at £249rrp for a 160GB system, include all the software and cables required to migrate a laptop drive’s data over to an encrypted platform,” he added.

  “As cybercriminals get smarter on the encryption cracking front, so company laptop users must use the best tools at their disposal to defend against their data falling into the wrong hands.”

  Share/Bookmark
   
• 

  Origin Storage 16:03 on 04/05/2010 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Data Encryption ( 43 ), Data Locker ( 20 ), Data Security ( 32 ), Data Storage ( 23 ), DataLocker 3 ( 14 ), DataLocker III ( 8 ), Encryption ( 32 ), Encryption Hard Drive ( 8 ), External Drive ( 8 ), External Hard Drive ( 12 ), External Hard Drive Encryption ( 8 ), FIPS ( 10 ), FIPS 140-2 ( 17 ), Hard Drive ( 12 ), Hard Drive Encryption ( 8 ), Hard Drives ( 7 ), Origin Storage ( 62 ), Protection ( 6 ), Secure Data ( 8 ), Secure Drive ( 8 )   

  Origin Storage’s 1TB Data Locker Has Arrived 

  Origin Storage, a leading manufacturer and distributor of IT storage solutions, has announced the arrival of their one terabyte (1TB) Data Locker.

  The Data Locker Secure Drive gives users peace of mind in the unfortunate event that their data storage device is lost or stolen, the 1TB Data Locker is the highest capacity portable hard drive available in the marketplace as it is compatible with 12.5 mm HDD’s.

  Data on the unit – which was being be demonstrated at the recent Infosecurity Europe held from 28th – 30th April 2010 at Earls Court, London – is secured by a 6-18 digit PIN number that is entered directly on the device itself.

  According to Andy Cordial, Origin Storage’s managing director, he expects the 1TB device, which can easily store two or more hard drive images from a typical desktop or a laptop PC, to be used in a variety of situations, as organisations grapple with the fact that penalties for breaches of the Data Protection Act will soar a hundred-fold – from £5,000 to £500,000 – with effect from the 6th of April this year.

  “The Information Commissioner’s Office has already indicated that it will penalise those organisations that experience a data leak, loss or theft which could reasonably have been prevented,” he said.

  “And financial penalties aside, there is the credibility issue that arises when a company has been pilloried in the media for failing to protect its staff or customer data. This can have a serious effect on a firm’s share price and longer-term reputation,” he added.

  It’s against this backdrop that Cordial says he expects the 1TB Data Locker to appeal to a broad spectrum of users, ranging from laptop users wanting to secure their data for home working or whilst on the move, to IT departments looking for a means of quickly backing up data via the supplied USB cable, then securing the drive using its PIN/password protection system.

  And, Cordial explained, because the Data Locker is so portable, it’s increasingly being used by organisations wanting to back up their data in a highly secure manner, and placing the unit in a physically secure environment, such as a fire-proof safe.

  At the competitive price point of £399 plus VAT it is offered at, he says, companies can back up their data in a highly secure manner and help avoid their business experience a potentially expensive visit from an ICO inspection team, for which the ICO has reportedly been recruiting extra staff for in the last few months.

  On the specifications front, the Data Locker uses a hardware based encryption chip to seamlessly encrypt and decrypt data using military grade AES / CBC mode encryption, with the unit only allowing its hidden SATA drive – connected via USB cable – to mount when the correct PIN is entered via the LCD keypad.

  You can also use the LCD screen to change the Data Locker PIN, dismount the drive, toggle the encryption on or off, or wipe the drive clean.

  Share/Bookmark