Last year Seagate suffered the sudden departure of two top-level EMEA executives, which was rumoured to be related to compliance issues in the Middle East.

Last week, however, the company announced the details of its re-organisation. The UK is now part of the North east Europe territory, one of four autonomous regions.

“We are going to be re-aligned by territory now, rather than segment and we will not be reporting directly to the US anymore,” explained O’Dwyer. “We are going to be better organised in terms of resources and accountability.”

The company will be more capable of adapting to customer demand, explained O’Dwyer.

One of the emerging threats is data security, particularly in the UK, where there have been many high profile incidents of serious security breaches by public servants at HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, he explained.

“We are going to be tailoring products to meet local demand. Encrypted hard drives will be in big demand and we aim to cater for that need. Banking, retail and HMRC are all losing data and generating lawsuits, so the whole issue of personal records is not going to go away.

“This will create new business for us securing laptops and notebooks in the next year.”

O’Dwyer added: “We are going to be better placed to customise and design products for specific environments. Surveillance and ruggedised storage will be another interesting area for us.”

Hypertec is believed to be a Seagate OEM partner in manufacturing encrypted drives.

Simon Smart, Hypertec’s technical director, declined to confirm this, but commented: “Moving into full disk encryption would be a smart move for any storage manufacturer, as this would be a massive new market development.”