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Dell to Offer Encrypted Solid-State Drives for Careless Workers

by Evan Shamoon on April 16, 2009 at 11:02 AM



Your hard drive is like your pet; if anything were to happen to it, you just don't know what you would do. And it doesn't help that it's constantly being attacked on all sides by viruses, breakdowns, and overheats.

To help deal with the problem, Dell announced yesterday that it will be offering encrypted solid state drives (SSD) from Samsung in the coming months, making Dell one of the first manufacturers to offer secure SSDs. The drives, which will reportedly deliver "some of the fastest encrypted storage available" (remember, SSD's are significantly faster than your standard hard drive) will bring your resting heart rate down a good 20-percent, as well; the drive offers 8.5 times the shock tolerance of a standard notebook's hard drive. Moreover, full encryption means that, for hackers, accessing all of this tightly held information will be tougher than frozen beef jerky. The encrypted SSDs will be available at 64, 128, and 256 GB capacities, though prices are still to be announced.

In support of its decision to hawk SSDs, Dell has also released a sponsored study of laptop-associated business risks, conducted by the Ponemon Institute. The study -- which surveyed 3,100 IT workers in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Mexico and Brazil -- aims to make a case for the importance of hard drives that are difficult to crack, both electronically and literally.

In regards to cyber-cracking, majorities of the surveyed IT workers in all of the surveyed countries agreed that "the failure to use proper authentication or passwords" is the leading threat to a company's loss of sensitive data. An encrypted hard drive should certainly help with that. More interestingly, over half of the IT workers in every country reported that hotels are among the places where laptops are most commonly lost. This certainly make sense to us, as, when it comes time for our return flights from a business trip, we're generally running like our hair's on fire and our britches are catching.

Over half of the respondents from the United States and Europe reported that rental cars find their fair share of lost laptops in their trunks and floorboards, while fewer than 10-percent of Mexican and Brazilian respondents were of the same mind. We can only deduce from this fact that rental car services are more prevalent in the United States and Europe than they are in Mexico and South America. For some reason, though, over 50-percent of both the Mexican and Brazilian respondents considered employees' homes as prime locations for laptop loss. We can only deduce from this fact that Mexican and Brazilian people live in massive, palatial homes terrorized by laptop-eating rodents.

Similarly, according to the respondents Mexican and Brazilian employees were more likely than their U.S. and European counterparts to damage a laptop due to "anger or frustration." If our mansions had been infiltrated by laptop-eating vermin, we'd be frustrated, too. Least surprisingly of all, Brazilian, French and U.S. employees were much more likely than others to damage their laptops by wasting food or drink on them. As we're sure our well-fed colleagues in Brazil and France can agree, we're all for hard drives that can resist our barrages of coffee and donuts, or pão de queijo and cafezinho, or beignets and café au lait. Come on, Mr. IT Man. Keep us fat; keep us happy.

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Tags: breaking news, BreakingNews, dell, samsung, security, solid state drive, SolidStateDrive, ssd

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