WinMagic Provides SecureDoc FDE for Olivetti Notebooks

WinMagic, Inc., in full-disk encryption (FDE), announced that Olivetti, a 100 percent-owned subsidiary of Telecom Italia, will now be offering a set of notebook-related services, based on its SecureDoc FDE solution. The new offering will be the first SaaS solution to offer full-disk encryption, encryption of removable media, activation and management of Intel Anti-Theft Technology (Intel AT) and support of self encrypting drives including Seagate Technology‘ self-encrypting hard drives.

"We designed these ‘protection’ services in order to enhance our new range of notebooks and to enable us to deliver value added services to both our B2C and SMB customers," said Paolo Crini, Director of Marketing, SW and Services, Olivetti. "And, the partnership with WinMagic was crucial for the advanced technology and the flexibility to perfectly adapt the solution to our managed services model."

Initially available with Olivetti PC Guard services for protecting PCs and data, the new line of notebooks and netbooks will offer access to an increasingly broad range of advanced services and applications designed to optimize corporate costs and performance. The new service offers easy to implement full-disk encryption solutions for organizations that do not have the technical expertise or capacity within the IT departments to comply with data security legislation. SecureDoc also makes it transparent to manage the latest security solutions, such as Intel Anti Theft Technology and self encrypting drives, from a single console.

SecureDoc supports Intel AT, which is available in select systems with the new 2010 Intel Core processor family. Intel AT acts as a laptop theft deterrence mechanism – enabling organizations to issue a ‘poison pill’ to stolen laptops whether or not they are connected to the internet. When a protected notebook is reported as lost or stolen, Intel AT can remotely disable the computing platform and perform a data-disable function. Purchasing the SaaS version, SecureDoc seamlessly adds full-disk encryption and encryption management to Intel AT – ensuring data cannot be accessed in the time it takes to report the loss and disable the laptop. SecureDoc’s enterprise-class ‘always-on’ full-disk encryption ensures data cannot be accessed even if the hard drive is removed and installed on another computer.

If the laptop is recovered, it can easily be returned to its pre-theft state via a typical help desk challenge/response scenario. Since the data on the recovered laptop is not deleted, the protection is non-destructive and the data has been protected by SecureDoc the entire time, it can be retrieved securely upon routine pre-boot authentication.

"We are particularly excited to see our partners offering a data encryption solution that takes advantage of Intel(R) Anti-Theft technology in a SaaS solution," said Sophia Chew, Vice President, Intel Sales and Marketing Group and General Manager for Services. "This will make a particularly compelling value proposition for small and medium businesses which do not have the technical resources in house, yet want to avail themselves of a disk encryption solution to protect their sensitive data combined with the added theft deterrence benefit of hardware-based PC disable."

SecureDoc also supports and manages hardware-encrypted disk drives such as the Seagate Momentus FDE and BlackArmor drives as well as the TCG ‘Opal’ specification drives. This provides organizations with the flexibility to deploy any combination of hardware/software-based encryption – or transition between the two – with full transparency for users and a consistent management interface for administrators – not only making it easy to customize data protection to meet any security protocol, but also ‘future-proofing’ investment in encryption.

"The best way to eliminate data theft risk is for vendors to work together to provide complete end-to-end data security solutions, and our collaboration with organizations such as Intel and Seagate enable organizations to implement comprehensive data protection practices to ensure lost or stolen devices don’t provide unwanted access to company data," said Thi Nguyen-Huu, CEO and President, WinMagic, Inc. "By providing a SaaS version of anti-theft and data encryption, Olivetti allow for easy deployment and implementation for organizations to manage all data, devices and security solutions under one umbrella," Nguyen-Huu continued. "WinMagic believes that productivity should not be sacrificed in order to protect all data on all devices, and so developed SecureDoc to work transparently in the background – meaning that organizations can rest assured that laptops protected with SecureDoc FDE work exactly the same as before the encryption was added."

"Delivering disk encryption solutions via Software as a Service (SaaS) presents a number of benefits to for individuals and SMBs looking to secure sensitive data but lack either the internal IT resources or internal IT skill set to do so," said John Girard, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner. "In general, organizations can offload the cost and management of the policy server, the management and escrow of encryption keys, first line technical support including password recovery help desk calls, and as further benefit organizations will typically pay a lower per user seat charge," Girard continued. "I do think that SaaS is an important delivery mechanism for data security solutions where SaaS is a great alternative for companies that feel that they cannot fully bear the cost of servers and staff to support encryption infrastructure."