Disk Encryption
Do you need Disk Encryption?
Let’s ask a few questions?
- Do you have a laptop you carry with information you would not like for others to obtain?
- Do you have complete security on all of your workstations containing protected information?
- Do you have servers that may be decommissioned without destroying all sensitive information?
These are all scenarios we hear from time to time. Secret government computers are replaced and the old ones sold at auction containing data that should never be released to the public.
Most of us know someone who has had a laptop stolen in a public place, or by visitors to an office building.
Desktop computers are no more secure than a laptop…just harder to get your hands on.
My company has been working with complete disk encryption. This works by requiring a password in order to even start the boot process, once the disk is encrypted. Once encryption is complete, the computer works quite nicely on a 64 bit windows laptop. Frankly, I can’t tell the difference. Those of you with Mac or Linux machines should have even better performance.
I don’t have any benchmarks to support the claim. However, on a typical day I consistently run a lot of heavy duty software. I’m known to be running SQL Server (two instances), Outlook, Excel, two instances of Visual Studio 2010, Grooveshark music streaming, Anti Virus, SQL Server Management Studio, and two RDP sessions. I would imagine that to be a pretty heavy load for a laptop.
Once of the nice things about disk encryption is that it no longer costs an arm and a leg.
I did a search and came across this WikiPedia link with a rather large list of different disk/file encryption utilities.
Do you think disk encryption should simply be a common practice, such as Anti Virus, or Spam guards? Send your thoughts to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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