Corporate mandated that we use Utimaco for all of our laptops.

It's not too bad, but it was a little buggy when we first started with it. You also have to make sure there are absolutely NO errors with the drive, and you need a bunch of contiguous space.

The POA (Power on Authentication) concept is neat; however, as Rich says, not completely secure. The other issue with POA is caching the domain password.

Lets say we log in as the local administrator and run the encryption. We then have to log off, then get the user to come upstairs and log in with their domain username / password. Then we have to right click the little icon and tell Utimaco to sync up with the central server managed by corporate. This caches the username / password in Utimaco.

IF we skipped that step and rebooted, then handed the laptop back to the user, they would not be able to login as their credentials would not be cached for the POA.


Now, once we figured that out, there is the training issue. Let's say the user has a laptop that was left at home for a couple months. Since then, they've changed their domain password a coupe of times. Now they power on their laptop and POA pops up. I'd say 9/10 users (even after we TOLD them about this) tried using their current username/password, thinking that the laptop magically syncs with the domain when it's turned off. Next thing you know, they're locked out.

We pick up the phone, call our eastern support desk, have to give them this long key challenge key, and they read an even longer challenge response key back to us. Needless to say, it's frustrating.


Unfortunately, we never got a chance to try out other vendors. I'm not sure how Utimaco stacks up against them.



Dave