PGP Corporation has become the first company to offer full disk encryption on a software-as-a-service subscription, which should bring the technology within the reach of more San Francisco / Bay Area small businesses.
Selling through Managed Service Provider Network channel partners enterprises will be offered PGP’s Windows or Mac Whole Disk Encryption software on a month-by-month ‘pay as you grow’ contract, with flexibility to increase or decrease according to needs.
The service includes the PC encryption software, a key recovery service, plus reports on the encryption status of each machine for compliance and auditing. Laptops using the software can only be accessed by providing a key, which means that should they be lost or stolen, hard drive data remains encrypted an inaccessible.
The costs themselves are comparable over a year to buying the software on a stand-alone basis, PGP admitted, but this removed the obstacle of deployment and ongoing management that has, up to now, put off many smaller enterprises with around 100 mobile users.
Deployment is probably the biggest advantage of the new model because it means that companies don’t have to commit staff and infrastructure to getting full disk encryption projects off the ground. Using either one of the appointed partners it should be possible to get the technology into a small enterprise within days or weeks, instead of months.
Lost laptops containing unencrypted data have become an almost routine way for enterprises of all sizes to lose sensitive data, a frequency IDC’s Charles Kolodgy was quoted by PGP as having recently described as “obscene”.
Monthly prices and volume discounts had yet to be confirmed but were said to be in line with the annual per-seat prices already quoted for stand-alone use. This is about $160 per year.
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