Data Encryption Simplified For Small Business Owners

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Laptop and smartphone theft pose a serious risk to your business. If your organization adopts a BYOD policy, these mobile devices may contain not just videos, contacts, and apps but proprietary company data, too.

According to a report by Kensington, 23% of IT theft happens in the office, while 15% of cases occur in airports. Even worse, a device’s price tag may not exceed $1000, but the average value of a lost business machine tallies to $49,246!

Between data breach, intellectual property losses, lost productivity, and legal costs, IT theft is a serious money sucker. And for the customers that trusted their data to you? Displeased is a gross understatement.

The good news, however:

Massive damages are preventable.

You can lose a company-issued laptop or smartphone and still keep the contents secure from prying eyes, thanks to encryption.

Encryption is the process of turning plain text information to ciphertext, making it unreadable to unauthorized users.

Without encryption, a thief can extract sensitive data from a machine panama phone number library using a USB thumb drive and a separate computer, even without the user’s log-in credentials. But if a machine is encrypted, unauthorized users can only see a nonsensical mishmash of letters, numbers, and special characters.

You still have to spend money to replace the lost device. But for businesses that collect personally identifiable information, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the financial, legal, and reputation damage that follows data theft.

Many forms of computer encryption exist, but full-disk encryption is the most reliable of the bunch. With full-disk encryption, a user must type in a passcode or provide a key (via a USB device) when powering up the machine to unlock the files.