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Enterprise Drive encryption - help!

Pitbully

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Nov 29, 2011
Messages
1,155
I'm in my 2nd year of collage working on my degree in IT/Network Administration/Network Security. Last week I started an IT Internship at a local nonprofit healthcare business, helping them deploy about 100 new desktops and 20 or so new laptops.

In short, I found myself In the middle of a huge argument with the IT people from the company and the CEO/CFO/COO's of the company. Being a healthcare facility, they have to abide by the HIPAA laws and the powers that be in the company only want to encrypt the new laptops. The IT people of course want to encrypt everything.

When the head IT person asked me about hard drive encryption and my opinion, my first question was, why not use Bitlocker? The problem is, these 100 new computers are running Windows 7 Professional, (which does not come with Bitlocker) and they are now looking for a solution to encrypt all their computers, and will integrate with Active Directory and their domain as well as making it easy on the end user and not spend more money on it. I have no idea why Dell sold them 120 PC's with Professional instead of Enterprise, and we're loading 7 off a network share, but that's another story.

My questions are these:

Can anyone recommend drive encryption that will work with Windows Active Directory and 7 Professtional with both FDE/FLE?

Has both key management and recovery options.

Has support for Intel AES-IN instructions.

We all agreed that tokens would be perfect, but all the options I've seen with tokens are 10k+ or more for 100 users. Cost is probably the biggest issue here, being the place is a charitable organization and nonprofit.
 
Being a non-profit, do they not qualify for any MS massive discounts on W7 Enterpirse?
 
Far as I know there's only really two options for whole disk encryption on Windows.
Bitlocker and Truecrypt. Truecrypt is free and works well but it's entirely standalone.
The whole work with active directory bit pretty much limits you to Bitlocker.
 
Being a non-profit, do they not qualify for any MS massive discounts on W7 Enterpirse?

Possibly, I'm actually checking on that for them now. A good friend of mine is an OEM Account Manager for Microsoft, but I hate bugging him right now, so I'll probably wait until next week when hes back in town.
 
If they are a volume license enterprise, which if all the licenses are legit they probably are with that number then Microsoft offers something called the Step-Up license. Unfortunately, there are many volume license types and different ones offer different options so this may or may not be available to you.


Here
is a link to more information on the program

Here
is a link to the latest product list, and pro to enterprise desktop is currently offered (Check Page 87 in the linked document). Depending on the MS program you are in, it could be as little as $10 per client.
 
On a contact I am working on now,

the client uses Mcaffee endpoint encryption "safeboot", It's just the thing you are looking for.

Just make sure user policies are updated before your first reboot or you will have to do a recovery (time consuming).
 
If they are a volume license enterprise, which if all the licenses are legit they probably are with that number then Microsoft offers something called the Step-Up license. Unfortunately, there are many volume license types and different ones offer different options so this may or may not be available to you.


Here
is a link to more information on the program

Here
is a link to the latest product list, and pro to enterprise desktop is currently offered (Check Page 87 in the linked document). Depending on the MS program you are in, it could be as little as $10 per client.

This is something I have to check out, because I wasn't a part of the entire process when the new computers were ordered, but I think Dell screwed up. They essentially sold the organization 100 computers with individual Windows 7 Pro licences. I don't know if they were ordered that way or that's the way they came, but I'll have to check and I'm defiantly looking at the step-up as an option as well.
 
On a contact I am working on now,

the client uses Mcaffee endpoint encryption "safeboot", It's just the thing you are looking for.

Just make sure user policies are updated before your first reboot or you will have to do a recovery (time consuming).

Thanks for the info, I'll defiantly check it out.
 
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