Not that we needed another reason to love Starbucks here at Virtual Computer, but they are quickly emerging as a poster child for why a better management and security approach is needed for laptop PCs—something we are a bit passionate about here.  After a lot of Internet buzz, leaked internal memos, etc. over the last couple of days, Starbucks has confirmed that a laptop containing personal data on nearly 100,000 employees has been stolen.  Not only that, but they are the first high profile “repeat offender” I have seen in a while.  They actually lost four laptops in late 2006 that also contained sensitive employee data.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has more information on what is another unfortunate example of stolen data and hardware leading to expense and, frankly, embarrassment that could have been avoided.

Our recent post on laptop theft statistics goes into detail on not only how many laptops are stolen and how often (one every 53 seconds – think about that) but also how we are designing NxTop to help companies avoid this problem in the future.

Rick Faulk, who we announced yesterday has joined our Board of Directors, sent us a pointer to a very interesting article in the November issue of Fast Company magazine.  It included some data points that I found a bit staggering:

• A laptop is stolen every 53 seconds.
• More than 12,000 laptops disappear each week from U.S. airports alone.
• Only 3% of laptops are ever returned.

The article went on to describe some of the technologies out there for tracking and recovering stolen laptops as they come up on a network somewhere “in the wild.”  This is innovate technology, and it seems like it is getting some very positive results.  However, in my view, it is only a partial solution.  With NxTop, we provide a similar ability to remotely “kill” a laptop and wipe away its data.  This throws up some pretty big obstacles to the run of the mill thief.  However, a criminal can counteract this through a variety of methods ranging in sophistication from simply not connecting the laptop to a network to pulling the hard drive out and accessing the data through other means.

For most companies, the monetary loss of the laptop itself is nearly meaningless.  The two bigger concerns are security of sensitive data and lost productivity of employees due to missing data and time spent without a functioning PC.  So, in addition to remote kill, we have layered additional measures such as:

• Trusted boot to protect against tampering with our virtualization layer.
• Encryption by default for all data on the laptop.
• Policy-based controls governing how often the laptop needs to “phone home.”  (For example, if the laptop does not check in at least every X days, it becomes inaccessible.)
• Transparent backup of user data to the central server.
• Hardware abstraction that presents a common set of “virtual hardware” to Windows regardless of the underlying PC hardware.

None of these things is a silver bullet by itself.  However, if a NxTop-enabled laptop is ever lost or stolen, the company has assurance that they have multiple measures working in concert to make it a non-event.  For example, even if someone was going to take a run at cracking encryption, the ticking clock of the “phone home” policy dramatically shortens the window they have to do so.  Additionally, the combination of hardware abstraction and user data backup allows IT to just pull a new PC off the shelf (even using an HP to replace a Lenovo or vice versa) and restore to a complete user-customized PC in minutes.

A government laptop containing personal information was stolen in North Carolina. The laptop contained personal information of people receiving services from the North Carolina Division of Aging and  Adult Services. Here’s the story.

While the data on the laptop was password protected, there is no guarantee that the personal information stored on the computer can’t be accessed. Now, there’s hassle and expense all around:

• North Carolina must contact all of the potentially affected people
• These people are asked to place a fraud alert on their credit report and to regularly monitor their credit report
• Additional people were notified to be alert (presumably, contact information was on this laptop but not social security numbers)
• The end user needs a new laptop and hopes their data is backed up (not just the consumer data but anything they’ve had on the laptop)

As you can see, this is a real problem for many people and, rightfully, there is real concern. In a situation like this, you hope it’s just the hardware that will be used by the laptop thief and not the data on it.

This scenario is one we are solving with NxTop. We realize that laptops will be stolen and that dealing with the follow-up in any situation is a pain. In most cases, it is the data on the stolen laptop that causes problems and not the hardware itself.

The solution we’ve come up with combines use of disk encryption and data leakage protection with the ability to remotely “kill” the PC from NxTop Center with a few mouse clicks.  Plus, all of the user’s data, applications, and settings are seamlessly backed up on the central server.  Simply register a new PC with NxTop Center—even a completely different laptop from a different vendor—and within minutes the user is restored to their personalized environment.  I don’t mean a base Windows image with collection of files from a backup server.  This is their desktop environment, right down to the settings and the wallpaper picture of their cat.

For more information, see this post: How Do You Deal With A Stolen Laptop? and this web page: Laptop Management and Mobile User Management

Stolen laptops are a real problem. Whichever statistics you choose to believe, the numbers are staggering and growing every year. Granted, this is no great surprise since laptop use is growing every year (side note: I haven’t seen anything but it would be interesting to compare the growth of laptop use with the growth of laptop theft).

With today’s solutions, a stolen laptop causes many problems and headaches:

• Confidential data may be lost
• User isn’t able to work until new hardware can be provisioned
• In a best case scenario, there is a recent backup of user data that can be restored to a new machine
• Employee wastes time re-customizing machine to their liking
• IT needs to build the laptop…best case, this involves an updated image
• Employee hunts down license keys for user-specific programs, wasting more time
• Depending on data on laptop, may need to communicate loss to customers which can be costly and embarrassing

What if there were a better way? What if you could simply “turn off” the laptop remotely?

This isn’t a problem with NxTop.

NxTop’s architecture separates the four main components that make up a PC: the hardware, operating systems, data and applications. This presents a very unique way of dealing with laptop theft: since all four components are separate, you can simply stop a piece of hardware (a stolen laptop) from accessing the other four components. Without that access, the stolen laptop is no longer a real problem.

As for the user, simply get them a new piece of hardware and provision a new NxTop to them. A few mouse clicks is all it takes to get them up and running on a new laptop, complete with their previous configuration (including any customization they’ve made), all of their user data and applications, and virtually no loss of productivity – and less of a headache for the IT administrator.

Sure, you still lose the hardware (assuming it isn’t recovered or found) but that’s much less of a loss than it could be otherwise.

Want to try NxTop for yourself? We’re still perfecting it but take a moment to register and we’ll let you know as soon as NxTop is available for download.