The Importance of Using Mobile Encryption

This might come as a surprise to you, or perhaps even alarm you, but on the city of London’s public transport system alone, around 200 laptops are handed into lost-property offices every day.  This figure, which doesn’t even include all the ones that are never recovered, extrapolates out to over 50,000 every year just for the buses, taxis and underground trains in a single British city.

London is the country’s largest centre for business, with head offices for many major multi-nationals, web commerce firms and government agencies (including the security services and the armed forces).

It is reasonable to assume that the majority of the lost laptops, and remember that 200 a day figure is only for the ones that are recovered, are business machines that could will certainly be carrying private company emails and possibly even extensive customer or business project data.

Now with a business machine there will be a log-in for a laptop. But is it ever really enough?  The one thing that a password won’t protect against is the physical removal of the hard disk from a laptop, something that’s becoming easier to do as the hardware in many business machines becomes more user-upgradable.  I have a dock for a laptop drive that I need for my work.  It cost me a little over £10 and its USB3 connection means I can copy the entire contents off a drive in short order.

Even putting a system password on the laptop’s BIOS won’t protect against this.  But how likely is it that anybody would ever physically remove a hard disk anyway?  It could be argued that any thief would simply reformat a disk they couldn’t access, wiping the data.

While this might be true for some less-educated and tech-savvy thieves, the value of data is rising every day and commercially such information can be sold, used for corporate blackmail or perhaps even worse.  With this I mean that the fines for breaches of the data protection act in the UK can be harsh, especially with the high-profile breaches we’ve heard about over the last few years.  These breaches again, don’t forget, are only the ones that we’ve heard about.  We can be certain that there are a great many more that occur every single day.

So how can your company, or an individual, protect their data on a laptop when lugging it around in the back seat of the car, on the tube or in a taxi?  The Encrypting File System that’s been a part of Windows for over a decade is one solution, but it’s not ideal as it maintains file encryption when files are copied off the computer.  If something then goes wrong with the host computer you could find yourself unable to access both the original and the now encrypted backups.

Bitlocker in Windows Vista and Windows 7 is the answer, and this is a feature that will expanded and carried forward into new versions of Windows.  It is a full-disc encryption system that is so secure that the US State Department once asked Microsoft to put in a back door (which they sensibly refused to do).

Laptops with Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chips on the motherboards which carry the encryption keys are becoming much cheaper and more commonplace.  This chip will prevent the data form being read even when the hard disk is removed.  Bitlocker is, frankly, the only way to secure your data for laptops running Windows.

So why should you do this?  After all, you can’t afford to replace all your laptops today with TPM-enabled ones.  As a purchasing policy for any company this should be at or near the top of the list.  The data protection registrar in the UK is getting less and less tolerant every day with privacy and data breaches, and the EU is also jumping in with their own legislation and fines.

If those fines don’t put your company is a very difficult financial position then the negative publicity and the loss of customer confidence could shut you down completely.  It is wise to remember that even in this social Internet age, people do not give away their personal data freely.  Everyone is becoming more aware and savvy of the need to protect their privacy, and if that means withdrawing completely from a company, online or otherwise, to do so they probably won’t hesitate.

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Defeating Disk Encryption

Importance of Keyword Research in Blogging!

A few months back I published a blog on how to use your blog as a branding tool. After publishing the same I received many mails in which the sender were looking for more tips for blogging. Yesterday I was reading the same blog and realized that I should write something about the most important criteria required for the success of the blog, i.e. the keyword research.

As I mentioned many times in the past that blogging is one of the finest and powerful marketing tools available these days. Believe me, blogging is not only considered as the marketing tools, but it is also used as a tool which can build your brand. Overall, everything starts from the posts.

One of my friend, who is the owner of a small business, planned to develop a website through which he can be able to sell the products which his company is manufacturing. I suggested him the way through which he can be able to attain more and more visitors, and that came through creating a blog. But creating a blog is not enough, you always need to manage the same too.

All set, I created a good looking e-commerce website for him, integrated the payment gateway too, and the online shopping store for him was ready. I also designed and developed a good looking blog too for him, created a few write ups too for beginning the same. Two sales within a week time was good for him too. Everything was seems perfect for him, but there was one question which was arising in the mind of my friend and it was, now what?

This is something which comes in the mind of regular bloggers too. This situation can be termed as bloggers block. Anyone can face this shortage of blog post ideas, and this can be removed with the help of the keyword research. Frankly speaking, keyword research is the backbone of the success of any blog, after all traffic is something for which every blogger is eying for, and some decent traffic can be easily achieved with the help of targeting some good keywords.

If you ask me then I can say you that for getting search engine love you need to target some good keywords and without doing the research you wont be able to decide which keywords you need to target for your blog. Here are some of the keyword tools which can help you to do the research with the keywords.

If you are also stuck with the new blog post ideas then Google Adwords keyword external tool is something which can help you out to get fresh ideas for new post. You can anytime search for any keywords and Google Adwords tool will provide you insight for the relative competition of the keyword along with how often the particular term is searched for. It also provides a few suggestions related to the same keyword.

Thus if you go by my choice then always opt for the keywords which has decent monthly search volumes, but less competition. Thus you can easily chose some keywords and prepare a list of some new titles on which you can work upon.

One of the finest tool for keyword research is Google itself. Whenever I do stuck with new blog post ideas, then I always prefer Google to suggest new ideas to me. A few days back Google started the option of Related Searches with Google search which use to give some good ideas to me, but don’t know why Google removed the same from last few days. Still, whenever I do need the new blog post ideas I use to go for Google search and search for some related keywords and it gives me lots of ideas for writing new blog post.

Although, a few years back Wordtracker was my first choice for doing the keyword reasearch, as far as Search Engine Optimization was concerned, but lately I shifted my focus towards Google Adwords External Keywords tool for doing the keyword research. But a few days back I came to know about the Keywords Questions, one of the free tool provided by the Wordtracker, and I really became a fan of the same. This tool can be found at https://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/keyword, a place where you can search for a single or short keyword and this tool will return you a list of questions which will include the same keyword and which are searched by people in search engines.

Well apart from all the above mentioned ideas for writing new blog post, I usually use Google Analytics to get keywords ideas. Normally anyone can search for such keywords which no one can be able to think about and this can be found from looking at the Analytics data, and thus you can get some fresh ideas about your new blog post.