Sepaton, a provider of disk-based data protection solutions, announced it is shipping a new solution that provides for the guaranteed, auditable erasure of information on virtual tape cartridges. Sepaton's Secure Erasure, a licensed option for Sepaton's S2100-ES2 data protection systems, enables storage administrators to schedule all or selected cartridges for a total data overwrite with the clearing or purging of low, medium and high sensitivity data. The solution meets National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidelines, the vendor says.
Sepaton Secure Erasure addresses more than just a vertical market segment such as federal government agencies, according to Jay Kramer, vice president of worldwide marketing at Sepaton. It can be applied to any business where customers see the value of protecting their information assets but also making sure that they are effectively deleting information over time where needed.
With Secure Erasure, organizations can meet their legal and regulatory compliance obligations or limited retention time periods of customer data and protection of personally identifiable, confidential or secret data. Secure Erasure tape selection, scheduling and reporting is integrated with Sepaton's graphical user interface for ease of use. No manual steps are required to remove, reinsert, or transfer media and an audit report is generated for each cartridge and emailed to the auditor automatically. Unlike physical tape, virtual tape cartridges are useable after the data is overwritten and they are available within minutes after the data overwriting process begins.
The destruction of data after a specific retention period is required in many regulated industries such as government, financial services, healthcare, and telecommunications. In government agencies where mandatory security labeling and information compartmentalization are common, there are also occasional Classified Message Incidents (CMI), in which a high-level classified email is accidentally sent to a user with a lower classification. The security response involves purging that email and any backups that may have been made of the information. Similarly, in financial or healthcare settings, occasional mistakes occur where credit card or personal information is copied to a system not classified to protect that information.
In the physical world, Peter Quirk, director of products for Sepaton, points out, people can just put a tape in a shredder and there is no way that data can be retrieved, but in the disk world, people just tend to delete a backup, but data is still recoverable through forensic means. Secure Erasure is intended to provide organizations with a guarantee that the data cannot be recovered, and also make the space immediately reusable.
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