If you have been reading the various blog posts we’ve published over that past few months you’ve seen us talk about: smart cards, cloud computing security, BYOD, MDM, FDE, FEE and more. What we really haven’t delved into is one of the main differentiators we offer in the market and the fact no one has be able to offer the same level of security – Pre-Boot Network-Based Authentication.

WinMagic was the first encryption security vendor to introduce the concept of pre-boot network-based authentication and introduce the product PBConnex to market. It was a revolutionary change in the way users authenticated. It took pre-boot authentication to a much higher level of security – validating the user, real time, against Active Directory or LDAP credentials stored on a server on the local network. So instead of relying solely on locally stored user credentials on a given device, PBConnex leverages the most current policies available from severs managing user access.

We introduced this technology two years ago and we have yet to see any of our competitors match it. There are ways to enable some pre-boot features via solutions like Intel AT, but still nothing comes close to PBConnex.

We also strongly believed that PBConnex could save organizations money. And who would think that deploying an encryption solution could also help reduce overall IT administration costs? We finally got to the bottom of that last year with our Ponemon study about the TCO of data encryption. For the first time we were able to quantify the value of using a solution like PBConnex.

We suddenly had the raw data that gave us estimates from IT professionals about the costs associated with password resets and computer staging among other things. From there, we looked at what were capable of doing with PBConnex and we realized there’s a significant amount of value we could offer beyond just securing the data residing within an organization.

It may be a two year old technology, but it continues to set us apart from the rest of the pack and more customers are now taking advantage of it.

I could go on about PBConnex and what it can do, but there are plenty of resources to refer to on our Web site.