I work at a large law firm and tested Checkpoint/Pointsec, Mcafee/Safeboot, Utimaco, and Credant. Like T3Gilligan my exec management had some pre-conceived/old school notions about needing pre-boot to be secure. But a colleague of mine at another firm whom went with Credant told me to take take a look. And again like T3Gilligan I was very impressed with Credant and ended up going with them. Pre-boot is absolutely not necessary from a security perspective and is a large reason why it's almost completely unmanageable. on the 2nd day of testing I found out something real interesting. the ONLY way pre-boot is secure is if the laptop is completely shutdown when it's lost or stolen. I put one of the pre-boot laptops (won't say which one) into standby which is what happens when you close the window but don't shut down (which everybody does. nobody shuts down their laptops anymore). when I brought it out of standby I ran a simple attack against it (basically a tool that creates a new local account), logged in and all the data was mine. problem with pre-boot is that, at the windows prompt the encryption key is available in memory so any login gives you full access to the data. with credant the keys are locked at windows prompt so there is no breach point. I honestly cannot prove that a laptop is completely shut off when it's stolen so the pre-boot solutions were all aced out. separation of data (local admin vs. domain user), reporting, ease of use and no change to my desktop and opps processes were some of the other reasons. very happy so far.

Rich