Intel® vPro™ Technology

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Storage Protection with Intel® Anti-Theft Technology - Data Protection (Intel® AT-d)

Challenges to Protecting DAR

In response to these regulations, IT professionals face the challenging task of incorporating DAR encryption technology [6] into their systems to protect sensitive data. Corporate data are increasingly mobile, distributed, and prolific. Data are routinely taken out of physically secured facilities to accommodate workers who travel or have flexible working habits. Data are also distributed geographically as corporations’ business interests take them into other cities, states, and countries. Data are accumulating at a high rate and are being stored on a widening variety of storage media. All of these forces drive the evolution of new storage media, higher bandwidth subsystems, and network-connected storage that blend data-in-flight (DIF) technology with DAR technology—a combination that did not exist in the past. As a result, IT professionals, seeking to apply comprehensive DAR protection to their systems, must make tradeoffs between worker productivity, effectiveness of the solutions, and cost to the corporation.

Privacy regulations hold company executives responsible for malfeasance, resulting in the need for companies to audit DAR system operations. Audit trails offer evidence of compliance with regulations and therefore protect corporations from potentially expensive and damaging law suits.

Worker productivity is impacted if data are not readily available. Consequently, access to data storage resources must be made available, but also controlled, a process that often involves the integration of encryption technology into identity management systems. Moreover, encryption keys are integral to the use of encryption technology. The management of these keys requires that they be integrated into identity and resource management systems in order for DAR technology to be effective.

All of these services, audit, storage, and identity management, integrated into a traditional manageability infrastructure, contribute to the deployment and operational costs of support services for businesses and thus are a significant part of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of DAR solutions.

IT managers also need to consolidate DAR services to benefit from economies of scale, through centralized user identity, authorization, and asset and key management services. Centralization offers greater assurance that information security policies are uniformly applied while also minimizing system maintenance costs.

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