Rick Faulk, who we announced yesterday has joined our Board of Directors, sent us a pointer to a very interesting article in the November issue of Fast Company magazine.  It included some data points that I found a bit staggering:

• A laptop is stolen every 53 seconds.
• More than 12,000 laptops disappear each week from U.S. airports alone.
• Only 3% of laptops are ever returned.

The article went on to describe some of the technologies out there for tracking and recovering stolen laptops as they come up on a network somewhere “in the wild.”  This is innovate technology, and it seems like it is getting some very positive results.  However, in my view, it is only a partial solution.  With NxTop, we provide a similar ability to remotely “kill” a laptop and wipe away its data.  This throws up some pretty big obstacles to the run of the mill thief.  However, a criminal can counteract this through a variety of methods ranging in sophistication from simply not connecting the laptop to a network to pulling the hard drive out and accessing the data through other means.

For most companies, the monetary loss of the laptop itself is nearly meaningless.  The two bigger concerns are security of sensitive data and lost productivity of employees due to missing data and time spent without a functioning PC.  So, in addition to remote kill, we have layered additional measures such as:

• Trusted boot to protect against tampering with our virtualization layer.
• Encryption by default for all data on the laptop.
• Policy-based controls governing how often the laptop needs to “phone home.”  (For example, if the laptop does not check in at least every X days, it becomes inaccessible.)
• Transparent backup of user data to the central server.
• Hardware abstraction that presents a common set of “virtual hardware” to Windows regardless of the underlying PC hardware.

None of these things is a silver bullet by itself.  However, if a NxTop-enabled laptop is ever lost or stolen, the company has assurance that they have multiple measures working in concert to make it a non-event.  For example, even if someone was going to take a run at cracking encryption, the ticking clock of the “phone home” policy dramatically shortens the window they have to do so.  Additionally, the combination of hardware abstraction and user data backup allows IT to just pull a new PC off the shelf (even using an HP to replace a Lenovo or vice versa) and restore to a complete user-customized PC in minutes.

The Daily Incite says it best: “No one cares about encryption” – not exactly, people care (and The Daily Incite does mention this). They care a lot. Encryption is a must have. It’s just that people don’t care about the details behind the encryption.

Encryption has evolved from a product to a feature and should be included in a wide variety of products. It’s not something that should be sold separately, or something that should be purchased from a third-party, or something that is optional. It’s important and it should be expected that vendors will work out the details and by the time the product makes it to you, it must work and be seamless. Except in very few instances, people don’t want to select encryption, they don’t want to know what the encryption is, they just want it included. It’s a must have but not a decision factor.

Mobile computing exacerbates the need for encryption. How often do you hear about stolen or lost laptops? What about data leakage? Encryption is a must for mobile devices – it’s not an add-on.

NxTop is built with integrated and full disk encryption to ensure total protection of your data, which is very important for managing laptops and other PCs. Our engineers (and myself) spent a lot of time to determine the right encryption for NxTop (secure, transparent, easy to manage, doesn’t add a lot of bulk, etc.) so that when you test and deploy NxTop (and you will :-), you can be sure encryption is in place without any worries.