Mobile data security demands mobile encryption

Solving the “data on the loose” problem starts with safer loose data

Despite an almost daily cadence of news stories about exposed customer data, most IT departments seem resigned to the fact that their number might be called.  It’s just fate, right?  What are they supposed to do – ban thumb drives?  Restrict notebook PCs to the office?

New products from Dell, Seagate and others are finally providing realistic solutions.  For a small premium to standard notebooks and mobile storage devices, companies can now make their employees data loss-proof with self-encrypted disk drive technology like Seagate’s Seagate Secure.

Blesssed by the NSA

These notebooks and portable drives can still be lost or stolen, but the data is 100% protected with government-grade 128-bit AES encryption.  The incident remains an inconvenient hassle rather than a newspaper headline.

Even the NSA has given this technology a thumbs-up.

Unlike software solutions, the disk drives in these products are encrypted automatically so employees can’t turn it off or forget to turn it on. There is no performance penalty.  Laptop passwords can be centrally managed with McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator and other vendors’ products.

While mobile encryption doesn’t plug every hole in your defenses (malicious or misguided workers, for instance), it does provide a foundation of security that you can build upon.

Let’s hear from users (or panners) of this technology – what do you think?