Given that there are regularly stories in the media about lost or stolen hardware (e.g. laptops left on trains), which leads to information and data falling into the wrong hands, we took the decision to protect ourselves so that we don’t become the subject of such a story; to protect our computers we use full disk encryption software. Having been asked on several occasions if this is difficult or expensive, we thought we’d put a brief explanation of how we approached it and a link to the software we used.
Back in 2006 with our first contract in the defence industry, we looked at what was available and took the decision to go with Becrypt; the same provider that the Ministry of Defence use for encrypting their mobile computers (they use BeCrypt Baseline/Enhanced). The product we use is Becrypt Disk Protect Standard.
Not that long ago, it was difficult for company such as ours, with small licensing requirements, to purchase direct from Becrypt, but that’s all changed and now they will sell to the requirement of just one licence.
The software is easy to use and configure and it provides 128 or 256 bit full disk encryption for the entire workstation and any removable media if required. It does take several hours to initally encrypt the drives, but this can be left to run in the back ground. Disk Protect requires authentication during the boot phase before it will continue and log in to the operating system. Disk Protect can be configured to 
authenticate with just a username and password, or as we configure ours, with a USB smart token (Aladdin eToken) which can store a number of different usernames and password combinations on it.
We know that if our laptop is lost or stolen; no-one can access the data on the drives unless they have the smart token and the username and password that goes with it.
We think it’s a small price to pay for our piece of mind; the cost of Disk Protect Standard software for one user licence is £79.30 with an option of £14.30 per year for maintenance & support renewal (support and automatic software upgrades).
Contact sales@becrypt.com for more information.
