Top Methods To Manage Mobile MayhemTop Methods To Manage Mobile Mayhem

With the decrease in the size and cost of portable devices, we can finally carry our entire life everywhere we go. When traveling to and from the office, I have 320 GB of storage in my laptop, 2 TB external storage in my bag, and 16 GB in my phone. And I'm carrying both personal and work documents and emails that I must encrypt alongside other information that is of little value to thieves, but that I wouldn't want anyone to grab.

Enterprises have an increasingly difficult challenge as users bring their own devices--and continue to lose laptops--and as portable storage becomes even cheaper and more common.

Encryption and remote wiping of portable devices is often discussed for mobile phones and popular tablets using mobile device management (MDM) solutions. These solutions can be expensive and may not support all of the devices within an enterprise, leaving us to search for encryption or remote-wipe solutions for all of the devices we have floating around.

We know data requiring protection will be stored on portable devices and a protection solution is required. Short of preventing the data from being stored on the device, encryption is generally the best method to ensure data is secure even if stolen. Current versions of OS X include FileVault and Windows offers BitLocker as native file encryption solutions. In mixed environments, these solutions mean supporting multiple solutions, or not supporting older operating systems. Each may lack features required by the organization found in commercial disk encryption utilities such as Symantec's PGP Whole Disk Encryption or CheckPoint's Full Disk Encryption.

If the native operating system or a third-party commercial solutions aren't for you, check out TrueCrypt's open source offering.

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