Arguably, customer data should not leave a secure location on a physical disk. If you want to move your server, backup the data, wipe the disk, move the server/disk/etc, and then put the data back on the disk once it is back in a secure location. The author mentions this in the article - define a secure boundary, don't let the data exit that boundary unencrypted.
Arguably, your position is bogus. Why cause a bunch of extra copying around to move a server. "Back up" indeed - to what? Another disk? It's turtles all the way down.
I don't. I know it has amazing bandwidth and it might be a lot faster than network transfer.
> Arguably, your position is bogus.
That's not nice.
> Why cause a bunch of extra copying around to move a server. "Back up" indeed - to what? Another disk? It's turtles all the way down.
Yes, to another disk, in the same data-center or in another one. If the data is encrypted end-to-end, it might be better to transfer it to another data center than to move the data between data-centers on physical disks for security reasons. It's less likely that an adversary is able to execute an attack where it is able to pin-point the exact moment and the exact data they want is being backed up between data centers. On the other hand, organizing a heist of a few trucks filled with physical storage leaving the data center might be easier to pull.
In these two scenarios we expect the encryption to be equally hard to crack for data at rest and data in transit, which is usually not true for performance reasons.
Okay, let's argue. Under what threat model is it a problem to transport sensitive data on encrypted disks?
Serious question: is there a sane, working, single solution to ensure that ? Flash-based devices are so complicated (versus the old rusty devices)
Anyway, this sound exhausting