Not much news has been coming from Sun Microsystems lately, due largely to
its pending
$7.4 billion acquisition by longtime partner Oracle.
Nonetheless, Sun revealed Aug. 19 that it has become the first enterprise
tape drive maker to be granted a prestigious federal security qualification:
the FIPS 140-2 Certification at Security Level 2 for its Sun StorageTek T10000B
tape drive.
FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) is a federal data security
standard for cryptographic modules published and maintained by the National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
All federal agencies are required to use only FIPS-validated products in
designing sensitive or valuable data processing systems, Sun said. While FIPS
certifications are optional for enterprise users, it now serves as a
differentiating factor for Sun's StorageTek products.
There are four levels of FIPS 140-2
certification. FIPS 140-2 Certification at Security Level 2 improves upon
the physical security mechanisms of a Security Level 1 cryptographic module by
requiring features that show evidence of tampering, including tamper-evident
coatings or seals that must be broken to attain physical access to the
plaintext cryptographic keys and critical security parameters (CSPs) within the
module, or pick-resistant locks on covers or doors to protect against
unauthorized physical access.
Data encryption has become a standard tool in enterprise IT security in the
last decade. Financial institutions, health care providers, government agencies
and numerous other sectors are moving to encryption to add another layer of
protection over sensitive data such as names, addresses, credit card numbers
and health records.
"The implementation of an encrypted system can mean the difference between
the inconvenience of missing or damaged data and a full-blown business crisis
that can threaten the very existence of the organization," Sun Storage
Group Senior Vice President Jon Benson said in a statement.
In other tape storage news, Sun said that its KMS Agent API,
published as an open-source tool kit by the OpenSolaris community, has been
adopted by Hewlett-Packard and IBM in their
LTO tape drives and by EMC in its RSA
RKM enterprise key management system.
For more information on Sun's FIPS 140-2 certification, go here.
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