Tarun Loomba VP of Client Storage Solutions Marketing SanDisk Corporation

SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK), a global leader in flash storage solutions, has announced the inaugural members of its broad ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISV) for security management.

This unique ecosystem provides SanDisk customers with fully certified solutions to ease the deployment and management of the newly announced SanDisk X300s SSD, the company’s first self-encrypting SSD based on TCG Opal 2.0 specifications, within their corporate environments. SanDisk is proud to provide compatible solutions from leading ISV partners including Absolute SecureDrive, Check Point Full Disk Encryption, Microsoft BitLocker for Encrypted Hard Drive, Wave Systems EMBASSY Security Center, and WinMagic's SecureDoc.

“Our X300s SSD ISV ecosystem enables a centralized encryption management solution for scalable and cost-effective deployment of self-encrypting drives,” said Tarun Loomba, vice president of client storage solutions marketing at SanDisk. “These solution providers will allow administrators to encrypt data, institute policies, and audit the end point for compliance.
Our breadth of partners also ensures that the SanDisk X300s SSD can be a scalable solution for companies ranging from SMBs to large enterprises.”

Today’s increasingly mobile workforce and BYOD environment, combined with the elevated security threat landscape, is forcing corporations of all sizes to reassess the value of incorporating encryption at the device level.

According to an InformationWeek Data Encryption Survey, only 38 percent of corporations had comprehensive data encryption policies in place, yet nearly half have responsibility to protect Private Health Information as mandated by HIPAA.[1] The same report says the corporations that are implementing data protection are using slower HDDs with some form of software encryption, which is still susceptible to vulnerabilities and requires a higher overall TCO to deploy and manage.

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“For today’s corporate environments, CIO angst over encryption of data on end-point devices and in the cloud hasn’t replaced worries about internal key management and interoperability among encryption products,” said Michael A. Davis, CTO of CounterTack and Informationweek contributor. “Combining a self-encrypting SSD with a compatible ecosystem of ISV solutions makes it possible to help IT leaders sustain high productivity, ensure legal compliance, and lower TCO.”

SanDisk’s broad ISV partner ecosystem delivers easier data protection management in today’s multiplatform environments, as well as cloud-based manageability of self-encrypting SSDs, making them a viable option for businesses with a wide range of IT requirements and budgets. This ecosystem also allows corporations to meet many of the regulatory standards for encryption of protected employee data such as those mandated by HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI-DSS, and many state and local privacy laws.

Additionally, because the X300s supports TCG Opal 2.0 and Microsoft Encrypted Hard Drive industry security standards and are supported by a broad ISV ecosystem, corporations now can easily deploy Data Loss Prevention methods to protect corporate IP, meet compliance laws, and reduce overall TCO.

SanDisk’s new X300s SSD also addresses the need for high performance, increased productivity, and a better overall user experience demanded by today’s mobile workforce‹making it a 'win’ for employees, as well as IT. The drive provides hardware-level encryption for additional security without the typical detrimental impact on performance associated with software encryption. Additionally, the SanDisk X”00s SSD offers lower latency and greater read/write speeds over traditional HDDs‹delivering a noticeable improvement in system responsiveness‹and is more reliable than self-encrypting HDDs or HDDs, which can help improve total cost of ownership (TCO) by reducing downtime due to hard drive failures.

"We share SanDisk’s goal to help secure the data of businesses, whether large or small, and are happy to support the SanDisk X300s SSD self-encrypting drives,” said Candace Worley, senior vice president and general manager, endpoint security at McAfee. Part of Intel Security. “Easily integrated into our McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator environment, the X”00s helps prevent exposure of sensitive data commonly found on today’s mobile and desktop PCs.”

”Deploying data at rest protection to devices has always been a challenge for customers. The encryption process can take significant time,” said Dustin Ingalls, partner group program manager, operating systems security and identity group, Microsoft. “We’re excited to see SanDisk helping customers overcome this challenge by including Encrypted Hard Drive support in SED’s like their new X”00s SSD. With this technology, Windows 8.1 customers using BitLocker will be able to achieve data encryption compliance within seconds rather than hours.”

About SanDisk
SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK), a Fortune 500 and S&P 500 company, is a global leader in flash storage solutions. For more than 25 years, SanDisk has expanded the possibilities of storage, providing trusted and innovative products that have transformed the electronics industry. Today, SanDisk's quality, state-of-the-art solutions are at the heart of many of the world's largest data centers, and embedded in advanced smart phones, tablets and PCs. SanDisk's consumer products are available at hundreds of thousands of retail stores worldwide.

[1] "Data Encryption: Ushering in a New Era," by Michael A. Davis, InformationWeek reports, January 2012.