Insurer tightens security with laptop encryption

Insurance giant Swiss Re is encrypting the hard disks on 4,500 laptops in a bid to boost security.

The company - which occupies the famous 'gherkin' building in the City of London - is one of the world's largest life and health insurance firms, and its employees regularly carry sensitive data on their computers.

It has bought software that scrambles data on mobile devices from security firm Pointsec.

Swiss Re project manager Fredi Schmid said the encryption is being rolled out in 70 offices in 30 countries.

He told silicon.com: "What we've done is secure our laptops - 4,500 of them - two-thirds of which have already been encrypted. The European countries have finished the rollout."

Only employees who have the correct passwords for the encryption software can access Microsoft Windows on their laptop - otherwise, it keeps unauthorised people locked out.

Schmid said apart from a few teething problems in training staff, the rollout was fairly straightforward: "All in all, it ran very smoothly. Of course we needed to train support staff but that's a technology-specific problem, not product.

"We encrypt whole hard disks so recovering data and passwords is a bit more difficult. So we wrote a support manual for it."

But Schmid said the main difficulty was making the user documentation readily available and spread across the world - and making sure the users actually read it. "All the users have received instructions but a number of them haven't read them. So they have to call the helpdesk to get their account released. That's the issue we have," he said.

Schmid and his team plan to encrypt the remaining 1,500 laptops over the next two months. In 2006 they intend to target USB hard drives.

"We do have plans to extend this to removable hard drives but we've postponed it until next year. We want staff to get used to this first."

"A further extension would be the family of PDAs, smart phones and BlackBerrys. But I think that is after the introduction of removable disks."