Bolton NHS Foundation Trust has selected security management firm Wave Systems' Safend Encryptor to encrypt sensitive data and manage and recover data securely.
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The Trust said it was one of the first to implement a mandate from the Department of Health that all mobile data must be encrypted, and it followed this process and met the required standard for data encryption of mobile devices, as well as all laptop hard drives and USB storage devices.
"We were proactive in being one of the first Trusts to implement the Department of Health's mobile data encryption mandate but wanted to go a step further in implementing encryption technology that would protect sophisticated hardware and eradicate the need for devices to be wiped," said Alex Fildes, system and networking technician at the Trust.
Initially the Trust selected McAfee Endpoint, but Fildes told Computing that this proved unreliable.
"It was unreliable with the hardware it was being used on, when there was an issue the data was not recoverable with the recovery tools available from McAfee," he said.
The Trust encountered problems with some of its hardware, where the disk encryption failed and devices had to be wiped. The most common problem experienced, according to the Trust, was when a new laptop was acquired it would contain a new chipset or new hard drive design that would not work reliably, meaning that laptops that were configured, encrypted and given to users had to be returned within a matter of weeks, or even days.
The Trust said that the laptops would not boot up due to an encryption error and that the IT team was also unable to retrieve the data because the hard drive was encrypted.
The organisation went through a tender process and looked at two options: Safend Encryptor and Check Point Full Disk encryption.