> And the ones where the attacker would have access to only the encrypted data seems very unlikely, like physical access to the data center This is the primary

> And the ones where the attacker would have access to only the encrypted data seems very unlikely, like physical access to the data center This is the primary purpose of encryption at rest. It is not unlikely. Have you ever worked in an average datacenter? Some of them have very little physical security and don't monitor employees' access to cages. And if you have a cage on the same floor as another customer, all it takes is a fake name badge and a clipboard to walk up to someone with their cage open and say you're doing a routine inspection. Walk into the cage, pop out a drive, put it under your clipboard, walk away. Ask physical security pentesters how "difficult" it is to steal from a datacenter. And let's not even get into dumpster diving, where clients regularly toss entire servers without erasing disks into dumpsters. Like someone else said, it also is a good practice in multi-tenant configurations where a misconfigured storage or compute backplane could expose data to the wrong tenant.