Canadian Law Blog Hall of Fame

2015 Canadian Law Blog Finalist

2014 Canadian Law Blog Finalist

2013 Canadian Law Blog Awards Winner

2011 Canadian Law Blog Finalist

2010 Canadian Law Blog Finalist

2009 Canadian Law Blog Awards Winner

2008 Canadian Law Blog Awards Winner

2007 Canadian Law Blog Awards Winner

2008 InnovAction Awards



  • Categories
  • Archives
    April 11th, 2008

    A change would do you good
    A change would do you good..♫

    Words and music by Sheryl Crow, J. Trott and B. MacLeod.

    My friend and fellow blogger Jim Calloway picked up on my blog post Do You Want to Know a Secret?…on whole-disk encryption for lawyer’s laptops, flash drives and portable devices in his blog post entitled: Security Issues of Carrying Digital Documents. Now Jim has a philosophy of not allowing comments on his blog, so I will take the liberty of replying to his post here!

    Jim asks why we haven’t seen more secure laptops out in the market. I think the answer to Jim’s question is that they are just starting to appear.

    In Information Security Magazine’s web site they have a news item from January 3, 2008 entitled:
    Hardware-based encryption gains most innovation of ’07. In that article it states:

    ‘Hardware-based encryption is just making its way into the mobile device market, but it’s coming on fast. Earlier this year, Seagate announced the Momentus 5400 FDE 2 hard drive, at first available only through clone laptop company ASI, but now available on select Dell models. Intel has announced its chip-based hardware encryption, code-named Danbury, will ship with vPro processors in the second half of 2008.

    “By end of 2008, we’ll see a fair amount of variety of offerings,” said Jon Oltsik, senior information security analyst for the Milford, Mass.-based Enterprise Strategy Group. “By mid-2009, there will be more widespread combinations. By the end of next year, if you are replacing laptops, you’ll have several options–not just from Dell. It will be pretty much universal.”‘

    SO the short answer to Jim’s question is – it’s a’coming! And I would say – it’s about time! A change towards greater laptop and portable device data encryption will do us all good!

    This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 2:43 pm and is filed under Change Management, Issues facing Law Firms, Technology, Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

    One Response to “An Idea Whose Time has Come!~”
    1. John Ryan Says:

      The issue with having encryption will be the ever increasing need to keep up with processing power and storage space. And the inevitable sicking feeling that you would get if your laptop goes missing.

      If you use terminal services back to your office server then no data is on your laptop, and since you are only using it as a keyboard and screen, you can grab the cheapest laptop from any outlet and be working again in minutes with no issues of data being in the wrong hands.

    Leave a Reply