Top 7 Encrypted Hard Drives
When you hear that another 20,000 customers of a less-than-careful company are at risk of identity theft, you probably roll your eyes.
Mon, April 20, 2009
PC Advisor (UK) — By now, we're all getting desensitised to horror stories about missing hard drives full of private information. When you hear that another 20,000 customers of a less-than-careful company are at risk of identity theft, you probably roll your eyes. And it's hard not to enjoy the irony when government officials entrusted with the security of the nation get caught out by something as simple as a forgotten laptop.
But why haven't they learned their lesson? And, perhaps more pertinently, why is such critical information being allowed to leave the premises or the (presumably secure) confines of the civil service network in the first place?
It's not an issue that's confined to large organisations, of course. In fact, in small companies, there's likely to be a more loosely applied IT policy with regards to the comings and goings of laptops, the copying of files to and from USB keys for convenience and other more haphazard methods for backing up and archiving documents.
Do people really need to take the entire output of their time employed with a company with them on each and every business trip? They almost certainly don't; nor should they be allowed to.
Many companies give their staff free rein to install whatever they like on their PCs. As a result, work PCs and laptops end up filled with photos, music and other non work-related items. Vying for space with all this clutter, there's generally some pretty important stuff - the sort of thing you don't want someone to casually acquire.
Having a policy that involves storing everything on a central server - and enforcing it - can help ensure files that shouldn't leave the office don't leave the office. But even small companies that lack such a structured setup can secure their data by backing it up to encrypted drives. Thankfully, such drives are now easy to come by, reasonably priced and simple to understand and set up.
In fact, as well as avoiding complex setup software, they can make things easier for your PC. Hardware-encrypted drives offer a performance boost over encryption that relies on software running on Windows.
Whereas encryption software asks the PC's processor to do the number-crunching, encrypted drives use special processors, built into their housing, that scramble data as it's written to disk. Models such as Seagate's Maxtor BlackArmor hardwire the chip into the hard-drive circuitry in what's called full-disk encryption.
Such drives are popular in corporate laptops, but it's a feature that is only now becoming widely available in external drives.
