I'll give you 1.2 billion reasons to encrypt your backups

Here's the reality, plain and simple.  Since the ChoicePoint breach in February 2005 there have been 9 publicly-disclosed data breach incidents involving tape loss starting with the Bank of America on 2/25/05 and ending with Providence Home Services on 1/25/06.  These 9 incidents exposed the personal data of over 8.6 million Americans.

The best estimate of the cost per breached individual was done by the Ponemon Institute, a security research firm that specializes in data privacy.  According to Ponemon, the cost per breached individual is roughly $140.

Now do the math.  8,601,000 (# of Americans whose personal data was breached) x $140 (Ponemon Institute estimate of the cost per breached individual) = $1,204,140,000!

Does anyone need any additional reasons why they should encrypt their confidential backup data?

Comments

[Andreas W. Kuhn]

Encryption taken one step further...

This summer of 2006 will see a true revolution in encryption technology. Seagate will be deploying their new "Momentus 5400 FDE" hard drive for laptops. The FDE (full disk encryption) feature encrypts every read/write sequence without any performance loss.

The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) guards the encryption keys and the hard disk is only functional on machines authorized. I would expect all PC OEMs to start offering this revolutionary Seagate hard disk in the fall of 2006

More info here:

http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/marketing/PO-Momentus-FDE.pdf