INFORMATIONWEEK REPORTS
Full Disk Encryption Evolves
Earlier this month, the Naval Hospital in Pensacola, Fla., began notifying thousands of individuals that personally identifiable information about them had been lost when a laptop disappeared. In August, the National Guard announced that a laptop containing personal information on 131,000 members had been stolen.
We could go on—rarely does a month go by without an organization revealing the loss or theft of a laptop brimming with sensitive data. Full disk encryption, or FDE, is the preferred mechanism to address this threat because, as the name implies, the technology lets IT encrypt the entire hard drive so that sensitive data is protected, no matter where it resides. But unfortunately, FDE adoption comes at a price: complex and costly deployments, additional licensing fees, and one more application for IT to support. Now, adoption of a new standard for hardware-based FDE, called Opal, aims to alleviate some of that pain.
