Dell Adds Support for Hardware Crypto Accelerator

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When it comes to security, encryption has never been more popular. In the wake of an increased number of major security breaches and the Edward Snowden scandal involving the National Security Agency (NSA), interest in all things related to encryption has never been higher. The challenge is that the performance of just about anything encrypted leaves much to be desired.

Dell this week moved to address that specific issue with the introduction of Dell Data Protection | Hardware Crypto Accelerator, which makes use of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) co-processor on Dell systems to accelerate the processing of encrypted data at a relatively nominal extra cost.

Brent Hansen, director of client solutions software for Dell, says that while Dell will continue to offer both software-based encryption and self-encrypted drives (SEDs), there is no substitute for dedicated hardware when it comes to encryption performance.

While it’s not clear to what degree enhanced security is playing a role in the battle for PC market share, Dell is making a concerted effort to make client security a major issue when deciding which PC vendors an enterprise should go with.

By making hardware-based encryption more easily available at the time of PC purchase, Hansen says Dell is trying to take performance issues off the table as an inhibitor to encryption adoption in environments running Windows systems.

By and large, internal IT organizations have resisted encryption because of both performance issues and the simple fact that it can be hard to manage. But as IT security continues to become a front and center business issue, it won’t be too long before most systems are equipped with some form of encryption as the new standard for providing basic IT security.