Mobile and Secure.Com

It didn’t take long for tech companies to catch on to the growing market need for ways to secure data held on employee laptops. I’ve read various hardware and software solutions, the latest being the OmniAccess 3500 Nonstop Laptop Guardian from Alcatel-Lucent.

Most of the solutions I’ve read about so far rely on the laptop thief booting the laptop in the state that it was stolen. In other words, powering up the laptop and trying to log on to the internet. This assumes that the thief is not a data thief, as data thieves just remove the hard drives from laptops so that no custom hardware is activated that may destroy the data, or no security software is executed that could delete/corrupt the data. A data thief will slave the stolen hard drive to his own machine (or more likely, image the drive and work on the image).

The OmniAccess 3500 acts as an encryption/decryption key for the data and without it, the data cannot be decoded. It also allows remote control, GPS tracking, and remote data erasure calls.

In theory it sounds like a step in the right direction. However, separating the PCMIA card from the laptop prevents the card from destroying any data on the laptop hard drive (assuming there is one and that the PCMIA embedded OS is not running like U3 and using the laptop hardware as a dumb terminal). You may not be able to decrypt the data, but you still have a copy while you wait for someone to reverse engineer the encryption algorithm.