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#018: Why You Need to Encrypt Your Hard Drive and How to Do It
In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉Why data encryption is important for data security
〉Simple steps on how you can start protecting your data
Transcript:
In this episode of The Power Up Project, I'm going to be talking about why you should be encrypting the data on your laptop.
Hey, welcome to this episode of The Power Up Project. I am Ben Love, your host, coming at you directly from Orlando in Florida. If you can hear 'The Girl From Ipanema' playing gently in the background there, please excuse the distraction. Today's topic is encrypting the data on your laptop hard drive. I'm going to start with the first question around that though is 'Why would you do that?' Well, we all know that encryption is basically scrambling the data that you have stored in such a way that only you can read it. If that data gets into somebody else's hands, they will not be able to read it. Why would you want to do that? Well, let's say that you lose your laptop. Let's say that it gets stolen from the office. Let's say that you leave it in a taxi.
That means if you have an unencrypted hard drive, it means that the person who stole that laptop can very easily take that hard drive out of your laptop, put it in another computer or put it into a little USB caddie, and they will have full access to every bit of information that's on that hard drive. Now, that's quite terrifying, particularly if you work with really sensitive information, particularly if you have personal information for your client, such as credit card details or healthcare related information. You can really see it could be a very smart idea to make sure that your laptop hard drives are encrypted.
Now, in Australia, we also have a thing called the Mandatory Data Breach Notification Scheme. This is basically a law that states that if information is lost from your organisation somehow and that information has the potential to cause significant harm for other people, then you must notify the authorities. Now, this can be quite a daunting thing to face for organisations, but one of the great ways to make sure that you don't have to notify is to make sure that the data on that laptop hard drive is encrypted because in that case, nobody will actually be able to read the data. Now, I'm not a lawyer, that is not legal advice, but that is anecdotally what we're seeing happening in the industry. We can probably agree by this point that it is a good idea to encrypt the data on your laptop hard drive. How do we do that?
Well, in Windows 10 Professional and Windows 10 Enterprise, there's a great little feature called BitLocker. On macOS, there is a feature called FileVault. They all do basically the same thing. Basically, they run behind the scenes there and will encrypt every bit of information on your laptop hard drive there so that you and only you can access it. Now, there are various requirements to be able to turn on BitLocker in Windows 10 primarily around the hardware in your laptop. You need a little thing called a TPM chip, but most of the business grade laptops that are out there that Grassroots IT works with will have a TPM chip in there. The macOS hardware already has everything that it needs in there as well, so you should be good to go.
After that, there's just a few little settings that need to be turned on to enable that file encryption. Now, that can either be turned on manually per computer or if you have a fleet of computers in your organisation where we need to turn on BitLocker, we can do so centrally with what's called a group policy. We can talk to your IT person. We can just push that out to all the machines in your network and make sure that's done. It is a very easy process to step through, it is very secure and reliable, and it will potentially save you a whole lot of heartache further down the track.
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By Ben Love & Ben DampneyIn this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:
〉Why data encryption is important for data security
〉Simple steps on how you can start protecting your data
Transcript:
In this episode of The Power Up Project, I'm going to be talking about why you should be encrypting the data on your laptop.
Hey, welcome to this episode of The Power Up Project. I am Ben Love, your host, coming at you directly from Orlando in Florida. If you can hear 'The Girl From Ipanema' playing gently in the background there, please excuse the distraction. Today's topic is encrypting the data on your laptop hard drive. I'm going to start with the first question around that though is 'Why would you do that?' Well, we all know that encryption is basically scrambling the data that you have stored in such a way that only you can read it. If that data gets into somebody else's hands, they will not be able to read it. Why would you want to do that? Well, let's say that you lose your laptop. Let's say that it gets stolen from the office. Let's say that you leave it in a taxi.
That means if you have an unencrypted hard drive, it means that the person who stole that laptop can very easily take that hard drive out of your laptop, put it in another computer or put it into a little USB caddie, and they will have full access to every bit of information that's on that hard drive. Now, that's quite terrifying, particularly if you work with really sensitive information, particularly if you have personal information for your client, such as credit card details or healthcare related information. You can really see it could be a very smart idea to make sure that your laptop hard drives are encrypted.
Now, in Australia, we also have a thing called the Mandatory Data Breach Notification Scheme. This is basically a law that states that if information is lost from your organisation somehow and that information has the potential to cause significant harm for other people, then you must notify the authorities. Now, this can be quite a daunting thing to face for organisations, but one of the great ways to make sure that you don't have to notify is to make sure that the data on that laptop hard drive is encrypted because in that case, nobody will actually be able to read the data. Now, I'm not a lawyer, that is not legal advice, but that is anecdotally what we're seeing happening in the industry. We can probably agree by this point that it is a good idea to encrypt the data on your laptop hard drive. How do we do that?
Well, in Windows 10 Professional and Windows 10 Enterprise, there's a great little feature called BitLocker. On macOS, there is a feature called FileVault. They all do basically the same thing. Basically, they run behind the scenes there and will encrypt every bit of information on your laptop hard drive there so that you and only you can access it. Now, there are various requirements to be able to turn on BitLocker in Windows 10 primarily around the hardware in your laptop. You need a little thing called a TPM chip, but most of the business grade laptops that are out there that Grassroots IT works with will have a TPM chip in there. The macOS hardware already has everything that it needs in there as well, so you should be good to go.
After that, there's just a few little settings that need to be turned on to enable that file encryption. Now, that can either be turned on manually per computer or if you have a fleet of computers in your organisation where we need to turn on BitLocker, we can do so centrally with what's called a group policy. We can talk to your IT person. We can just push that out to all the machines in your network and make sure that's done. It is a very easy process to step through, it is very secure and reliable, and it will potentially save you a whole lot of heartache further down the track.