Shilpi Dey - Product Marketing Manager
I spent the better part of last week at the Intel Developer Forum, a great forum that brings together various technology solution providers who are integrating the next generation of Intel technologies. It was exciting and an honor to showcase PGP® solutions for Intel® Anti-Theft and Intel® AES-NI.
Standing at the booth surrounded by dazzling demos and silicon chips, I was taken back to when I bought my first laptop almost a decade ago. It was from an online auction site and was advertised as “scrubbed clean”. On receiving the laptop I realized there was actually data on it and most of it was actually very sensitive data, including bank passwords, LDAP login information, emails and a few family pictures. Fast forward ten years and here we are today with accountability requirements to HITECH/HIPAA/PCI, etc. and words such as PHI, PII, data breaches and fines keeping CFOs, CISOs and risk management officers awake at night.
Today, full disk encryption is a must-have if organizations want to protect data (user data and temporary files, swap files, etc.) on their laptops from loss or theft. The beauty of PGP Whole Disk Encryption with Intel Anti-Theft is that it not only protects the asset, but the data itself. If a laptop is lost or stolen, it will turn into a brick and the data will stay protected.
The elegance of this solution is that if it turns out you left the laptop at the coffee shop and the kind employee behind the counter kept it safe for you, access to the laptop can easily be reactivated securely.
So the protection sounds great, but what about performance? I often get asked about user experience and performance with PGP Whole Disk Encryption. The truth is, yes, it’s a piece of software and like all other piece of software you install there is a little lag to the normal operation of the system. The good news is that it’s hardly perceptible and being a user myself, the user experience is business as usual. Even better news is that with Intel’s new instruction set, AES-NI (available in Westmere processors), the performance of PGP Whole Disk Encryption is enhanced several times over.
As for me, I can't wait for next year's IDF.