Fidelity Investments. Wells Fargo Bank. The University of California. All are major institutions that share the ignominy of losing track of laptop computers filled with the personal information of clients, employees, customers or students.
These organizations combined lost several thousand dollars worth of capital equipment, but the more expensive loss by far was the data on those systems.
Here at eWEEK Labs, Im testing a service designed to mitigate the threat of lost data: Absolute Softwares Computrace Data Protection. Absolutes newest offering allows administrators to remotely wipe clean a file, folder or entire hard drive according to the Department of Defense specifications.
Within the last year, most major laptop manufacturers added BIOS support for Computrace, allowing the Absolute software to self-heal and to continue operating after a disk format, operating system reinstallation or even a complete hard drive replacement.
Computrace Data Protection will work for devices that do not include the Persistent BIOS Agent. However, for maximum coverage, IT managers should look for laptops that provide the support.
BIOS-level support for Computrace Data Protection is now available in most new corporate-grade laptop models from Dell, Lenovo Group, Hewlett-Packard and Gateway. However, we dont expect to see this feature added to many older models that started shipping before last summer.
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