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Hardrive Encryption

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by brant.yeskie

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My boss came to me and asked if I would do some research on HD encryption for our remote users. I've searched the web with little luck and only come up with two products that don't look very promising. Any references would be greatly appeciated andthanks in advance.

8 replies

by sendai

Well, there are a lot of variables to be considered. Primarily what level of security you are looking for and where your balance is between security and performance. Also there is the consideration of your budget as there are quite a few inexpensive but slower software solutions and quite a few non-performance degrading expensive hardware solutions. Give me more details and I'll try to point you in the right direction.

by mcorr

Be careful with some of these encryption solutions, as some of them are not recoverable if the user loses the key/password/etc. We had a user who encrypted their HD and forgot the password, and we could not recover anything off of it.

Do you really need ecryption locally? Do your users need have sensitive data stored locally, or have you looked at using a VPN?

by rzan

Although I strongly oppose any such local encryption tools for the HD, Norton Your Eyes Only seems to do a pretty good job. But be weary, your user forgets the password..the data is locked for good. Why do you need such encryption anyway for the local file system? If you are worried about local file security, consider installing NT Workstation 4.0 or Windows 2000 Pro on the machine and have the user lock down the machine when they step away.

by brant.yeskie

is trying to accomplish. If a remote user happens to have his/her laptop stolen or lost that the sensative data stored on their local HD cannot be accessed. I've found some software located on www.pcguardian.com that appears to accomplish what we need. It does have the ability to recover lost passwords.

by jmharvey

This functionality is built into the Windows 2000 OS. It also includes key recovery, which if set up correctly allows administrators to decrypt information on drives if an employee is terminated, for example. In my opinion this is another reason to move to Win 2000, particularly on a laptop.

by carsten.trapp

Have you ever thought about PGP or Utimaco LanCrypt? - two diffrent products with diffrent goals concerning what to encrpyt, how to encrypt and mays of recevory.

by shanghai sam

The company I work for is using PointSec from ProtectData. This software has a combined bios-protection and harddrive encryption. It encrypts the whole harddrive not just some folders.
The administrators have a powerful tool for unlocking locked computers and can also do that remotely.
It's very efficient and it doesn't affect the performance of the computer.
Our installation of PointSec is available for users in 4 different countries (8 locations) and we're using a central administration.

We want to avoid that any sensitive data gets out if our traveling users' laptops become stolen/lost.

More information can be found at www.protectdata.com

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