Seagate and Mobile Armor Offer Self-Encrypting Drives for Government Apps

Mobile Armor and Seagate Technology will work together to sell self-encrypting storage drives to government and health care customers.

Under the partnership, Seagate will join Mobile Armor in co-marketing and actively selling the Seagate Momentus Self-Encrypting Drives with DriveArmor technology, the companies said in a statement on Oct. 25.

Seagate has already been shipping its drives with Mobile Armor's automatic data encryption service preinstalled for more than a year.

"Seagate is teaming with leaders such as Mobile Armor to deliver the management and auditing capabilities that business and government need to protect sensitive information," said David Seesorf, senior director of notebook product line management at Seagate Technology.

Seagate Momentus SEDs deliver government-grade encryption and preboot authentication on the hard drive without any performance degradation, according to the release. Designed to prevent unauthorized access to data on lost or stolen computers, the drives met the requirements to be certified FIPS 140-2-compliant last month, the companies said.

Federal Information Processing Standard Publication 140-2 is a United States government computer security standard that accredits cryptographic modules published by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology. The cryptographic modules are generally used by the U.S. government and other regulated industries such as financial and health care institutions that collect, store, transfer, share and disseminate sensitive but unclassified information.

"The FIPS certification of Seagate Momentus Self-Encrypting Drives is a crucial step in expanding the adoption of these drives by federal agencies, many state and local governments, and regulated industries such as health care, finance and defense," said Seesorf.

The self-encrypting disks are also OPAL-compliant, as defined by the Trusting Computing Group, Seagate said.

Mobile Armor's DriveArmor software is a policy-driven data security management tool. IT managers define specific policies and set up strong preboot authentication on the laptop or desktop drives to ensure unauthorized users can't access the data even if the machine is lost or stolen. It also offers extensive auditing and reporting capabilities, the companies said.

As part of Mobile Armor's Full-Disk Encryption lineup, Seagate's Momentus self-encrypting disk drives look and act like normal laptop drives, as long as the user is authorized.

By using the Seagate drives in conjunction with DriveArmor's management and reporting features, organizations meet regulatory compliance requirements for data protection, the companies said.

Delivering high capacity and performance, Seagate Momentus hard drives come in various storage capacities, encryption capabilities and spin speeds. The FIPS 140-2 self-encrypting drives are available in 250GB or 500GB sizes. They come with Serial-ATA interface and have 7,200-rpm spin speed, said Seagate.

Panasonic already integrates Mobile Armor's data encryption product on Seagate's FIPS-certified self-encrypting disk drives onto select Toughbook models under a partnership announced by Panasonic and Mobile Armor in September. The drives are available on the Toughbook 31 rugged clamshell notebook, the Toughbook 19 rugged convertible tablet and the Toughbook H1 Health, a mobile clinical assistant device.