There are more that 5,000 laptops stolen each year in some of the major cities of the world so it is no surprise that corporations are now trying to find ways of keeping the data on these stolen laptops away from the prying eyes of would-be laptop thieves. This situation is excerbated by the growing size of hard drives especially laptop hard drives. This is a problems because the more hard drive space users have on their laptops, the more the temptation to load all kinds of sensitive data on the computer "fpr easy access". Worse yet, business executives who are constantly on the move are piling on more and more of corporate data onto laptops which they promptly forget in a taxi or hotel in the next city they visit.

So the challenge facing Chief Security Officers today is whether they should encrypt the hard drives of these corporate laptops. Encryption solutions are not as easy as the vendors make them sound. Key management and recovery make the implementation of encryption on a large scale very tedious to manage. In addition, the cost can add up quickly if encryption is to be done on a large scale. Then there is the nightmare of recovery if the user should forget his/her password. Sure rescue discs can be created, but these can only try to recover corrupt data and boot blocks. In some cases, encryption software does not store the password which means if you lose it, your data might be gone forever.

For those who are interested, there is an open source solution called Truecrypt. Truecrypt works across Operating Sytem platforms - Windows, Macintosh and Linux/UNIX. The deployment of whole disk encryption is very easy and the cipher strenght used is top notch.