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One billion-dollar company isn't taking chances with data stored on its laptops. It deployed full disk encryption on every machine, an increasingly popular security strategy.
Name your target: the laptop storing your company's trade secrets or the laptop containing proprietary partner and customer data, and your company's financial information. Timken Company can afford neither to be left behind in a cab or hotel room, nor be stolen by a determined thief working for a competitor, or one looking to sell hardware on eBay.
Timken isn't unlike most public companies its size. Of its 25,000 employees, more are doing business on the road every day, and the risk to the enterprise's intellectual property and financial posture associated with a lost or stolen laptop is too great not to address. And also like most public companies its size--Timken has 62 plants and 114 offices in 27 countries--full disk encryption is an increasingly popular security measure.
"Protecting our intellectual property has been the prime concern of upper management," says Roger Herbst, senior IT technical specialist at Timken.
Herbst had to do very little arm-twisting for the funding for a rollout of full disk encryption on every Timken laptop. Executives understand the consequences of losing a laptop loaded with the specs for the steel bearings, alloys and lubricants Timken produces for the automotive, industrial, aerospace and super precision industries. Nor do they want to see booming bold-faced headlines on page one of The Wall Street Journal blaming the company for losing partner or customer data, or payment processing information.
With disclosure costs booming and state data breach notification laws unforgiving, full disk encryption makes sense on many fronts, not the least of which is that it often relieves companies of the burden of having to publicly disclose a breach.
"Data loss can be crippling both financially and legally, and protecting data with a well-implemented full disk encryption policy will prevent many of these problems," says expert Michael Cobb, founder and managing director of security consultancy Cobweb Applications Ltd.
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