Sepaton Ships Secure Erasure Option ($5,000 per Node)

SEPATON, Inc. announced the availability of Secure Erasure, a licensed option for SEPATON’s S2100-ES2 data protection systems providing guaranteed, auditable erasure of information on virtual tape cartridges.

Secure Erasure enables storage administrators to schedule all or selected cartridges for a total data overwrite with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) approved data pattern for clearing or purging low, medium and high sensitivity data to ensure that no data can be retrieved from those tape cartridges.

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) where 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 tape world, the backup tapes would be shredded. In the virtual tape world, the information must be securely erased over the entire length of the virtual tape.

“As Eagle Alliance, a CSC-led Joint Venture, prepares to offer a cloud-based capability for the U.S. Intelligence community, it is critically important that security concerns are addressed at the hardware level for cloud infrastructure,” said Michael Myers, director, new business, Eagle Alliance. “SEPATON’s new Secure Erasure option can be used to guarantee that storage resources allocated for backup/recovery can be completely erased and reused without fear of data contamination, which will allow us to manage cloud resources securely for multiple tenants.”
 
 “With the Secure Erasure option, backup administrators have the means to comply with an organization’s data destruction policy more cost-effectively than with physical tape libraries,” said Fidelma Russo, chief operating officer, SEPATON, Inc. “The secure deletion of data is a key component for companies to successfully implement a true Data Protection Lifecycle Management solution (DPLM) where data center managers  can leverage SEPATON’s ContentAware intelligence to efficiently, deduplicate, replicate, report and manage the information assets of their enterprise for business success.”
 
Availability and Pricing:
The Secure Erasure option for the S2100-ES2 series is immediately available. Pricing for the Secure Erasure option is $5,000 per node.