Many of us travel with laptops. We use laptop docking stations at the office, and we use our laptops to work all weekend from home. Our users do this, too. For about the past five years, many vendors have been betting their bacon on the business of providing encryption tools for e-mail, PC directories and documents, and even entire hard drives. I saw one company that now offers an enterprise-wide hard-drive encryption system. The time for these technologies has certainly come!

If your laptop is lost or stolen, you do not want the files on your hard drive to be compromised. We often keep very sensitive e-mails and documents on our laptops that in the wrong hands could spell disaster for us and our employers, as the Veterans Administration technician learned a few weeks back. For safety's sake, you probably will want to encrypt all the data on your laptop.

If you decide you want to take the plunge into hard-drive encryption, you want to deal with an industry leader in the field of encryption. I would not want to trust my disk drive to a newbie or a shareware product. I want proven reliability and tech support in case I have a problem accessing my hard drive. In the hard-drive encryption market, PGP Corporation is a leading force and could be a good choice.

Here's a short list of hard-drive encryption solutions from the Google Directory. [2]