HIPAA Blog

[ Friday, September 07, 2007 ]

 

Encrypting the Hard Drive: This may be a potential fix for the problem of data loss from stolen laptops: an automatically encrypted hard drive. A thief would have to enter at least a password and perhaps more levels of identity authentication to access the data on the hard drive.

I've long said that for HIPAA purposes, if you're requiring encryption of internet emails and other data in transit, but not encrypting data at rest, you're essentially locking the doors to your car while you're driving on the interstate and not while it's parked in the driveway at night. Seagate's product is protecting data at rest, and if it's on a laptop, it's data at rest that's also sort of in transit (in a physical, not electronic, sense). They're also coming out with an automatically encrypting hard drive for desktop computers (wow, does anybody really use those anymore?), which is also smart, since office thefts occur too. Good idea; me likey.

Jeff [9:45 AM]

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