We're going to be rolling out 150 pocket PC's to mobile workers and the group IT security manager has decided we need to use Pointsec on them.

Just got the software this morning and as I'm stuffed for time I wondered if anyone has experience of it.

yes we have it. I don't like it. My new laptop doesn't have it and I'm going to make sure it doesn't.

It removes the hibernate function. Seems to make the laptop take forever to bootup sometimes over 5 mins. Also we've had alot of harddrive failures, not sire if this is because its constantly encrypting/decrypting. And once the harddrive had failed it was improssible to recover the data using the pointsec software as the disk wouldn't boot, normally you could put it in another computer and recover the data but because of the encryption you couldn't use that method.

That's just the kind of response I was hoping for.

We already have a piece of software that will do what the security team want pointsec for and just have to pursuade them to drop the whole pointsec thing.

I would defo get them to drop it. Although it might be ok for pocket pcs but for laptops its wack. Most pocket pc's just have enough cpu to run the os, dread to think what pointsec will do to it.

we've got it on laptops. it slows stuff down a bit (very very slow on first install until it's encrypted the hard disk) but works like a charm. nice, stable, enterprise-grade stuff and does what it says on the tin: keeps your data safe from anyone who comes across your laptop. something like 40% of laptops get nicked in their lifetime...

we've got it on laptops. it slows stuff down a bit (very very slow on first install until it's encrypted the hard disk)

a bit! its shocking. why encrypt the whole disk? Why not just encrypt the important files?

a bit! its shocking. why encrypt the whole disk? Why not just encrypt the important files?

that'd be messing about. you can't control where data gets put, so you encrypt the lot. if you didn't encrypt system files then it'd be less secure...honestly, this is good stuff. can annoy the end users a bit as there's a performance hit but if everyone used it you wouldn't get stuff like this being a problem:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1757792.stm

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/15/ernstyoung_ibm_laptop/

ric

good stuff if it keeps killing your hard drive - then no one can access your files. Thats my personnal experience from it. I wouldn't have a problem if it worked correctly.

Surely better off encrypting a folder or partition rather than the whole disk?

Surely better off encrypting a folder or partition rather than the whole disk?

for personal use, maybe. for corporate, no. pointsec's enterprise grade, so it does cunning stuff like lets the helpdesk unlock it via a challenge/response system etc. doesn't need certificates backing up and it's uncrackable in a reasonable timeframe. bottom line is you want the whole lot encrypted. who's to say that something quite innocuous that isn't encrypted (say usernames for example, or the SAM, or anything at all, really) wouldn't be useful to a hacker? this way the drive as a whole's totally secure. the only penalty you pay is a little disk performance, and not much at that. what's not to like?

for personal encryption (folder level or secondary partitions) i personally recommend truecrypt, which is free, open source, very very strong and also does fun stuff like plausible deniability with the option to set a duress password that decrypts the volume to show one set of data, and a real password that shows your real docs - great, great software...