It is seems that we are always hearing about someone important, usually in government, losing their laptop. Often that laptop had potentially been holding sensitive data about the government’s citizens or data important to the defence and security of the nation in question. We have discussed this briefly in a number of posts recently. However if people are losing the odd laptop, just think about the numbers of mobile phones, USB drives and media players like that shiny new iPod, that must also be going missing.

These gadgets are far easier to lose, and I bet it is happening in fairly significant numbers. The problem is that with the general convergence of functionality of all these devices, they all are likely to contain data, some of which may be sensitive.

So what is to be done? Well one reasonably obvious approach is to use encryption, so if you do happen lose your device, the data is still protected. If done right, some level of encryption automation can be built into your process for working with data and your gadgets. Essentially there are two approaches to this, the first through software and the second through the hardware itself. The first approach is by far the more flexible approach though generally will mean extra steps to ensure the data you are storing on your portable devices is actually protected. The second is where storage device itself has encryption built in. An example of something like this would be the Amacom Encryp2disk pictured above. This second approach limits your choice but does avoid creating extra hoops to jump through to encrypt your data.

How do you secure your data on your portable devices? If you don’t perhaps it time start thinking about it!