There are a variety of ways to secure data, either on the perimeter or within the local area network (LAN), but the most fundamental method in a defense-in-depth model is hardware encryption. ABI Research (www.abiresearch.com) expects the global hardware encryption market revenue to reach US$36.4 billion by end of 2015.

The advantage of hardware-based solutions is that they bypass many of the typical drawbacks of software-based solutions like performance degradation or vulnerability to attacks aimed at the encryption key stored in memory. Because encryption is available at drive-level, this solution is not dependent on any software or operating system used, and usually cannot be turned off by users.

Examples of storage products that use hardware based encryption include hard drives, self-encrypting drives and USB flash drives. Players like IronKey (by Imation), WinMagic, Vormetric, SanDisk, Seagate, Rambus, SafeNet, and others offer innovative and interesting solutions in this market.

Organizations across all sectors face an increasing number of regulations and requirements to protect data from unauthorized access both internally and externally. One of the key sectors where hardware encryption will be rapidly adopted is healthcare. Health organizations are likely to be vulnerable targets because they are slower to adopt measures like keeping personal information in separate databases that can be closed off in the event of an attack.

“In the future, more and more healthcare organizations will turn to hardware-based encryption technologies together with other security measures to ensure that the data remains encrypted to all but those authorized to access it. Meanwhile, government, defense, and intelligence agencies are also under intense pressure to comply with a lengthening list of legislative requirements and protocols designed to protect sensitive data in transit and at rest,” says Monolina Sen, ABI Research’s senior analyst in Digital Security.

Other sectors where hardware encrypted products will be adopted include financial services, consumer electronics sector, communication networking security, automotive and transportation sector, and others.