Most of the current furor over leaks of proprietary data has centered on cases of lost or misplaced laptops or backup tapes. A few years ago, with less mainstream media attention, there was a similar round of stories about data leaks. Most of them centered on careless end-of-life management for desktops and servers.

IT shops had scrapped systems, sent them to recyclers, or returned them to leasing companies, all without properly scrubbing the hard drives. Many people found out then how little “format c:” or the equivalent did to protect confidential data. Even following it up with three complete disk overwrites, although much better, was not a sure thing.

At my site, we went to an increased number of overwrites, sometimes paid the leasing company to do a scrub as well, and my data center manager friend began to call on the services of his “Decommissioner” (a 10-pound sledge) at times. It fell short of thermite for achieving the true-delete, of course, but was easier and cheaper to use. [Ed: Here's how the military is looking at doing it.]

If you truly want secure data on disk, one approach is to encrypt it. This can be accomplished in software (as with PGP products), or in hardware. Seagate is now selling 2.5-inch hard drives with built-in AES encryption of all data written to disk. Seagate has even partnered with Wave Systems and Secude for password-management software that makes the platform useful in an enterprise setting (i.e. by allowing for password backup and transfer compliant with the Trusted Platform Management standard).

Broad commercial availability of such technologies, especially for the critical laptop market, will be a huge boon in any compliance-sensitive or just generally security-conscious environment. The “Whoops, where’s my laptop?” leaks should begin to fade from memory.

Using encrypted disks could hugely improve the secure decommissioning of data center systems, too. After all, an encrypted disk becomes a disk full of garbage as soon as the encryption key is changed. It can then be treated like an unencrypted disk and repeatedly wiped as well, of course.

But even if Seagate were shipping the same capabilities in any of its enterprise storage lines, are such drives ready to use in your data center? No. However, it might be just as accurate to say our data centers are not ready to use such drives.