Dell to ship encrypted SSDs with laptops

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 12 May 2009 at 14:58

Dell will start shipping encrypted solid state drives with its Latitude laptops later this summer.

The company will begin offering the Samsung drives to business customers, as part of a series of premium security measures for corporate laptops. Laptop tracking and recovery, remote data wiping and accidental damage servicing are among the other services included in the company's ProSupport scheme.

Dell claims its SSD encryption is superior to the BitLocker software built into Windows Vista. "It has an encryption engine on the drive, so it's not taking any resource from the CPU," Lionel Bohar, head of notebooks at Dell EMEA, told PC Pro. "It's completely transparent to the end user."

Bohar says the drives will launch "by the beginning of the summer", although he wouldn't reveal how much extra businesses will have to pay for the encryption. "It will be a premium compared to [regular] SSD drives," he said.

Dell's announcement conveniently coincides with Dell-commissioned research from the Ponemon Institute, which claims that 42 million gigabytes of potentially sensitive data is lost on business laptops across the world every year.

The research claims that 57% of UK companies have found evidence of "inappropriate interactions with other employees" on laptops, and that hotels were the venue where Brits are most likely to leave a business laptop.