Back on a nice sunny day in July 2002 I was sitting in my office drinking my morning diet cola (I prefer my caffeine cold) when a “friend” called. With more than a little chuckle in his voice he asked if I really believed the old marketing saying “that any publicity is good publicity.” While still in the dark, it was quickly dawning on me that it was not going to be as nice a day as I hoped. After a few more comments, I was directed to the website for the New York Times where I read about one of our employees talking about how he lost his laptop with ”Almost everything I need to run my business was sitting on that laptop and I didn’t have a backup.”
Looking for the silver lining in this event, it did provide the impetus for us to speed up backup plans that we were working on. Within a short time period all laptops were scheduled with an enterprise software product making regular backup of all key data. With a fleet of over 80 laptops, we’ve had additional laptops lost and even a few technical failures. In each case these backups saved the employees and the company time and money.
However, even after this event it took us a few years to completely roll out laptop encryption. We tested out a variety of options and each one caused issues: employees having an even harder than normal time logging onto their laptops; employees running into cases where they could not access certain files; files that were emailed were still encrypted and the recipients could not use them; the technical staff pulling out their hair coordinating the installation of the encryption software. While we needed the security of encryption – the loss of usability was severe.
We eventually got all the laptops encrypted – but the time lost and hassles were still on my mind when I began doing IT consulting. I’ve made great use of Software-as-a-Service and I embarrassed that I never explored encryption via SaaS at an earlier time. However, once I stumbled upon Alertsec I immediately became a user and an Alertsec evangelist. The security of encryption, the convenience of a three step install and the reduced help desk issues because Alertsec handles the 24 hour support. For companies of any size this is a great value to increase the security of your organization.
Oh, and one more piece of advice. In addition to training your employees about what to do if a laptop is stolen or lost, remember to also mention that speaking to the press, twittering about it or blogging about it is not a way to keep security issues confidential. Just because it seems obvious to you, don’t assume it’s all that obvious to the rest of the world!