SQLServerCentral Editorial

The $90,000 Laptop

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A hospital got the opportunity to pay $90k for a lost laptop.

There's no excuse for this. If you have a Windows laptop, enable bitlocker today. If you have OSX, setup FileVault. If you're on Linux, choose dm_crypt or something else. Go ahead, get that setup, save off your keys as a backup, and come back. I'll wait.

Now, don't you feel better? I'm sure you do, and you are somewhat more protected from the random theft, misplacement, or loss of your laptop. All of those things happen regularly. Not to each of us, or many of us, but as the collective set of developers and DBAs around the world, we lose laptops regularly.

Certainly some of us have precautions like never carrying data around. That's good, and I'd recommend that. For those that need to develop on the go, they might have a curated set of test data we can use for development. That's fine. We should make an investment in building test data and have that data used for unit, integration, and system testing.

We should have investments in ensuring that our systems can not only be encrypted, including encryption of backups and networks, but that we can restore those systems in disasters. Make the investment in ensuring recovery, and everyone is more likely to accept encryption. We need to invest in a process for managing keys, revoking them, and re-issuing them. We need to be sure we can upgrade encryption algorithms over time. What is secure today might be easily broken tomorrow.

I'd urge you to make all those investments, but until you do, at the very least, encrypt your laptops and desktops. While any random theft could result in a lost laptop, it's not unheard of for anyone walking through your office to pilfer a drive lying around, or even one inside a desktop.

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