It seems like every week still a story comes across my desk about “Laptop with sensitive data stolen… no encrypted hard drive”. Well after 26 years, one thing I have learned is that people (big companies especially) learn slowly. I mean, there have been countless damaging stories and cases of actual money paid out because a company lost a laptop with sensitive customer or employee data on it and the hard drive was not encrypted. In fact, when I still worked at Ernst & Young, I remember one day seeing Google Alerts come in for a story that E&Y had lost a very sensitive laptop (which honestly all of our laptops working there were at least pretty sensitive). It was exactly one week later when we were all required to bring our computer into the office so our tech support could install hard drive encryption for us.

That all said however, if there was one place on the entire planet that you would think would have caught on, it would be Stanford University. After all, Stanford is perhaps the world’s finest learning institution in the area of high technology. Well according to THIS STORY IN COMPUTERWORLD, even Stanford has managed to blow off the warnings until it was too late to avoid public embarrassment.

I only bring this up because we want you to know that it is NOW too late. You need to get those laptops you use encrypted yesterday. If you are a managed services customer of ours, your laptop (like mine personally) is already encrypted with either Windows Vista BitLocker or, even better TRUECRYPT, a FREE and open-source disk encryption utility that works beautifully. Feel free to get in touch if you want help getting protected!

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