Encryption
Encryption has long been used by militaries and governments to facilitate secret communication. It is now commonly used in protecting information within many kinds of civilian systems. For example, the Computer Security Institute reported that in 2007, 71% of companies surveyed utilized encryption for some of their data in transit, and 53% utilized encryption for some of their data in storage. Encryption can be used to protect data "at rest", such as information stored on computers and storage devices (e.g. USB flash drives). In recent years, there have been numerous reports of confidential data, such as customers' personal records, being exposed through loss or theft of laptops or backup drives; encrypting such files at rest helps protect them if physical security measures fail. Digital rights management systems, which prevent unauthorized use or reproduction of copyrighted material and protect software against reverse engineering (see also copy protection), is another somewhat different example of using encryption on data at rest.
Data erasure
When encryption is in place, data erasure acts as a complement to crypto-shredding, or the practice of 'deleting' data by (only) deleting or overwriting the encryption keys. 
Presently, dedicated hardware/firmware encryption solutions can perform a 256-bit full AES encryption faster than the drive electronics can write the data. Drives with this capability are known as self-encrypting drives (SEDs); they are present on most modern enterprise-level laptops and are increasingly used in the enterprise to protect the data. Changing the encryption key renders inaccessible all data stored on a SED, which is an easy and very fast method for achieving a 100% data erasure. Theft of an SED results in a physical asset loss, but the stored data is inaccessible without the decryption key that is not stored on a SED, assuming there are no effective attacks against AES or its implementation in the drive hardware.