BySharon Gaudin

Given the risk of exposing employee and customer information on a stolen computer, Seagate Technology sees a market for encrypting data on desktop PCs, not just laptops.

The company’s working on a PC drive that would use embedded chips to encrypt all information on the machine. If it’s then stolen, the thief would have to come up with a password at minimum, and two- or three-factor authentication at best. Usually it’s a stolen laptop that’s at the heart of data loss disclosures. Last month, a contract worker in VeriSign’s HR department had a laptop with employee information stolen from her car. And late last year, a Boeing employee was fired after his laptop, containing information on 3,82,000 current and former employees, was stolen. However, in both cases the employees didn’t follow policies requiring that such data be encrypted.

That could be a big selling point for Seagate’s drive since it automatically encrypts data anywhere on the PC. Dell, Fujitsu and Lenovo already sell laptops with Seagate’s 2.5- inch hard drive with native encryption. Seagate expects to ship the desktop version in mid-2008. With the 1-Tbyte desktop hard drive installed, once a PC is powered down, logging on requires a preboot user password that can be beefed up with biometrics and smart cards.