Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

I came across an interesting news story on computer World a couple of days ago and made a note to take a look. This paper is titled "Moving ahead with data security" and is written by Mario Apicella. This article talks about storage based security mechanisms rather than application based security. Host based protection works well in mainframe environments but in SAN based storage this becomes much harder to implement. The author goes on to talk about how complicated host based security is to achieve in modern architectures. Mario also talks about Symantec's purchase of Veritas although he finds out that even though Veritas staff think there will be a security based Veritas product no one else seems to be officially be talking about it. He sites Network Appliance's purchase of Decru as further evidence of secure storage in data storage companies. Mario goes on to discuss the security aspects of the NetApp aliance. Mario then talks about Seagates new vertical storage (bits stored vertically on the media - this sounds amazing!) and also their new hardware based encryption hard disk. As Mario says this new drive will protect data from cradle to grave without OS intervention. This is significant and will protect data from being taken from stolen disks. This is a very interesting three part paper / article.