(Source: Business Wire)
WinMagic®, the innovative leader in disk encryption, applauds the findings of Quocirca's latest data protection report written by Principal Analyst, Fran Howarth. The report, available at www.winmagic.com, states that most data theft is avoidable and is mainly caused by lost or stolen laptops and other portable devices. The report recommends that organizations protect all data on all portable devices with full-disk encryption, which encrypts almost everything on the disk, including file names, temporary files, boot sectors, etc. Howarth writes, "Full-disk encryption provides the greatest security against data loss should a device be mislaid or stolen and should therefore be considered to be best practice."
According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, more than 262 million data records containing personally identifiable information have been compromised through security breaches in the US alone since January 2005. However, information published by Data Loss DB, a clearing house for breaches that were made public in 2008, shows that just 14% of these cases were caused by hackers. This compares to more than 32% that resulted from the loss or theft of laptops, mobile phones, or other portable media and storage devices.
Quocirca's report explains how today's full-disk encryption solutions not only make it easy and cost effective for organizations to protect all valuable intellectual property, but also prevent users from bypassing security as well as eliminating the need for organizations to notify individuals that their personally identifiable information may have been compromised in the event of a security breach. Howarth believes that today's full-disk encryption solutions should not only be user friendly, but also be simple to manage to enable any sized organization to protect data throughout the entire enterprise.
"For any encryption system, ease of use is essential, but the provision of central management systems such as that provided by WinMagic's SecureDoc makes the use of encryption viable for organisations of all sizes," said Fran Howarth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Ltd.
