Provide added value with an off-the-shelf product
Your customers can now buy secure notebooks with Full Disk Encryption from Dell. Similar notebooks have been available in the channel from ASI and others for six months. The mainstream value of this technology is summarized nicely by Business Week.
This is a good chance to offer new value in a commoditized space. Even reselling the Dell machine as part of a “Get Safe” solution for your customers will be profitable for you, because they’ll value some additional help in setting up key administration and management. That’s necessary so that they can’t lose passwords. With FDE drive technology, if you lose the password, the data on the drive is lost forever.
The value prop for your customer for secure notebooks: if a system is lost or stolen, the data from that PC will never be retrieved. No chance of them being on the Evening News due to exposing sensitive customer records.
An added bonus is simple and worry-free drive retirement or repurposing. Simply throw away the key and the previously stored data is gone forever. No more erasing seven times, writing over data, and crossing your fingers.
Should you build your own secure whitebook? Probably not yet, unless you’re up for the task of integrating the key management software with the drive, as Dell and ASI have done with Wave Systems. If you get it wrong, you’ll have angry customers with unaccessible data.
Seagate’s drive in this space, in both the Dell and ASI machines, is the Momentus 5400 FDE.
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