Last week, we attended the SC Congress in Chicago, IL and walked away a little wiser and more informed. These events are always great to get a sense of what’s happening in the industry, what customers are concerned about and the types of solutions they’re looking for in their organization.

Having spoken with many private and public sector security professionals, there were some definite trends in the discussions, specifically embedded OS encryption and how to manage/control external users that are on the road a lot. All great discussions that addressed key issues customers face today – is OS-based encryption good enough and how do I control my mobile workforce.

There aren’t any black and white answers to these questions. OS-based encryption is ‘good enough’ if that’s what an organization can afford to use to meet whatever security requirements they need. But it’s more about managing all the encryption in an easy and consolidated manner, which is what we help address with SecureDoc. We strongly believe our full-disk encryption solution is better and stronger than OS-based ‘free’ encryption, but we also believe in working within the needs of the customer’s environment. It’s why we support things like managing OS X FileVault 2 – the native encryption in Macs.

As for mobile workers, it’s always our recommendation to lock-down those devices and ensure they check-in regularly. SecureDoc enables customers to not only enable full-disk encryption on laptops, but also get much more granular in their control by forcing the encryption of removable media, as well as, adding policies for crypto-erase if the device fails to ‘check in’ after a certain amount of time has passed.

All in all, a great show with some great discussions around what organizations are looking at and for in their security solutions today. We’re looking forward to the next event.