Roger Kay, president of industry analyst consultancy Endpoint Technologies, told attendees at the RSA 2007 conference this week that the widely-available Trusted Platform Module (TPM) embedded into tens of millions of enterprise PCs can be deployed immediately. The TPM is based on an open specification created by members of the Trusted Computing Group. Free whitepaper.

Kay, whose latest whitepaper on Trusted Computing is posted at the Trusted Computing Group website, noted that many enterprises have pressing security needs that they can address easily using available hardware and software.

"While some market watchers may feel that Trusted Computing implementation is in the future, the reality is that the TPM can be used at the client level alone to provide substantial value in the areas of authentication, password management, and drive encryption," Kay noted. "Since the TPM's first implementation in 1999 by IBM's PCD (now Lenovo), millions of modules have shipped, mostly in notebooks, and have been used for these tasks.

"These implementations do not require complex hardware or software, work in existing IT environments, and provide immediate benefit to organizations and users. If it's good enough for the National Security Agency, it should be good enough for you," added Kay.

About the market research report

The Endpoint Technologies 6-page whitepaper, "Trusted Computing is Real and it's Here " (January 2007), looks into deployment issues and reviews examples of trusted computing in use at a large pharmaceutical company, a large fast food company and a rental services company. The report also examines a telemedicine project relying on trusted computing.

Find more on the Trusted Computing Group and the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) specification at https://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/groups/tpm/ or visit Booth 2643 at RSA Conference 2007 this week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA, USA.

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