Encryption and the Assured Business. Do it or Die.

No one ever wants less security, and in today’s mobile computing world securing mobile data is becoming a real issue.

In early August this year a laptop was stolen from a car in Florida containing over 86,000 driving licence records and 42,000 airline licence records. In May another laptop was stolen in the US containing details of over 26 million armed forces veterans.

In itself this data theft is irritating, but what is scary is the fact this data could be used to secure loans or other facilities—not to mention the sensitivity of airline related data being stolen in this day and age.

Naturally these are the high profile cases that hit the press and cause uproar; what is not reported is the daily loss of hi-tec gadgets. Recent figures showed a massive 4,973 laptops, 5,838 pocket PCs and 63,135 mobile phones were left in the back of licensed London cabs in a 6 month period alone.

And let’s not even go down the route of counting the abandoned laptops at British airports following the latest security scares. Each one of these losses has no doubt caused grief and hassle, and the chances are that very few if any of these items would have had their data secured.

Organisations need to wake up to the threat they face now from stolen or lost data or they will see their reputations and possibly existence put at risk.

The good news is that there are solutions available.

One company that is making advances in the mobile data encryption market is DES or Data Encryption Systems. This British company was born out of work the founder did at GCHQ, the UK Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham where he learnt his trade in data encryption techniques.

The DESLock+ product is distributed free of charge for personal users which enables anyone to download and get encrypting their data. As it behaves as part of the Windows operating system it can be used from inside any Windows application, which DES hope will start to make its use ubiquitous.

The heart of the product is a set of encryption keys, any of which can be securely shared so that a group of users can work with the same encrypted data. A good analogy is that of sharing house or car keys with those that you trust

With this type of local encryption technology we are starting to see the “defence in depth” approach to security become a reality as organisations move on from an obsession with only securing the perimeter and get to grips with granular security at a very local level.

At least with products like DESLock+ organisations can start to deliver an Assured business from the desktop upwards which is critical if companies are to ride the wave of threats to their data security.