Central management of self-encrypting hard drives

Lenovo and WinMagic announced SecureDoc for Lenovo, a full-disk encryption solution for central management of new self-encryption hard drives that meet the Opal standard issued by the Trusted Computing Group.

SecureDoc also delivers fully-managed software encryption for PCs without self-encrypting hard drives, providing flexibility and a migration path for large organizations with strong security requirements, such as in healthcare, banking, education, insurance and government.

The solution is available on current and upcoming ThinkPad laptops as well as ThinkCentre desktops using the new Opal self-encrypting drives from Hitachi and Seagate Technology or unencrypted drives. It provides transparent pre-boot support for fingerprint readers built into select Lenovo ThinkPad laptops and ThinkCentre desktops. This integration of FDE with multi-factor authentication allows organizations to strengthen data security without negatively impacting productivity.

Additionally, SecureDoc makes it simple for Lenovo users to add full-disk encryption and encryption management to Intel Anti-Theft Technology – a laptop theft deterrence mechanism enabling organizations to issue a “poison pill” to disable stolen laptops whether or not they are connected to the Internet – ensuring data cannot be accessed before disabling a laptop, even with the hard drive removed and installed on another PC.

It also supports Lenovo’s ThinkVantage Technologies (TVT), productivity technologies that help with image creation/management and PC migration/deployment and Lenovo’s Rescue and Recovery TVT, which allows users and IT administrators to restore backups, access files and diagnose problems. Rescue and Recovery also deploys critical updates to PCs that are corrupted or off the network and applies patches to a PC during a restore operation.

In addition to the central management of self-encrypting drives, SecureDoc also allows the deployment of any combination of sector-based full-disk encryption, file-and-folder encryption, container encryption and self-extractor encryption – eliminating the need for organizations to invest valuable time and money modifying their existing infrastructure and security policies to accommodate a new encryption layer.

Also, in the event a password is forgotten or the end-user is unavailable, SecureDoc utilizes centralized escrow and management of encryption keys to ensure critical data can be accessed and thus reduces costly calls to the help desk.

“WinMagic believes it should be as simple to work on an encrypted device as an unencrypted device, and we’ve worked with Lenovo to not only provide PCs with transparent, built-in full-disk encryption and multi-factor authentication, but also to integrate Lenovo’s Rescue and Recovery program,” said Garry McCracken, vice president, Technology Partnerships, WinMagic Inc. “With full-disk encryption transparent, users don’t have to do anything extra to protect their data, ensuring no impact to user productivity and compliance with company data security protocols.”