This week is the fall Storage Networking World in Dallas.  At the show, we made an announcement today focused on storage security - a topic growing in importance. 

Threats to storage security are real and can be a significant liability.  Seems as though not a week goes by in the press without another story of some data being lost, stolen or hacked. And there is a cost associated with these type of breaches.  Here's an interesting web-based tool from Tech//404 that calculates the cost of data loss from security breaches and identity theft.  The site also talks about a number of class action suits with class sizes ranging from a quarter of a million people to two million seeking damages in the range of $1,000 to $21,000 per person in the class.  There could be some mind-boggling settlements.

Encryption is relatively easy - managing keys is the challenge.  Multiple key management systems increases complexity and lowers the success of recovery.  We believe that centralized key management trumps a disparate systems approach because it's more efficient and offers better data availability.  Today's announcement has two components:

• Enhancements to our HP StorageWorks Secure Key Manager - increasing the capacity to 2 million encryption keys per cluster and lowered entry price with a single client/node configuration.
• Disk encryption for the XP24000 and XP20000 -   encrypts data on disk drives so that data can not be read off a disk drive that is removed without having the key.  Here's a short white paper that talks about the XP disk encryption. 

We have a web page that has a number of white papers, including from a leading analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group, and other information on today's announcement.  While the announcement today focuses on storage, we have a broader security initiative called HP Secure Advantage Solutions.  We're driving solutions that protect data, protect resources, and provide validation. 

Here's hoping your data is secure and that we have a more secure week in the financial markets.