"If you look at the storage industry, there has been very little security built into any of the products," Brown says. This candid statement probably explains why the early stages of NetApp's initiative take a critical look at the status quo of data security.

"You can steal a lot more money by stealing a backup tape today than by assaulting an armored truck," Brown continues, adding that a company's backup data is much less protected that those tanklike trucks.

"What we are trying to do [with the Uncompromised Security Initiative] is to listen to customers' concerns [about security] and see how we are going to fulfill them," Brown says.

Brown lines up the major building blocks of a comprehensive approach to data security, including keeping the bad guys at bay, protecting the company perimeter, and implementing comprehensive data-protection measures. Customers may have skipped some of these data-protection measures because they were too onerous on daily operations, he says.

"We can do a lot better," Brown says. "We can build security into the infrastructure, and as vendors start building security into all their products, we can make systems a lot more secure."