I am not sure there is any point in starting this article by telling you that your laptop is important and should be made secure. Apart from the financial cost, these days, we keep a wealth of information on these machines. Your company may have such vital information on it such that a theft or loss of a laptop could easily spell the beginning of the end for your organisation.  Just imagine the disaster if your organisation losses a laptop holding a database of the private information of all your customers! 

Here a few common sense and not so common things you can do to protect your laptop. Obviously, the list is not exhaustive and may not all apply to your particular circumstance, but do take note of each in your overall strategy in your protection plan.

Physically lock down the machine

This is one of the most overlooked theft prevention step. I have heard of users taking a 5-minute loo break only to come back to find that the laptop they were working on a few minutes ago has taken a walk! You cannot carry your laptop everywhere that you go, therefore, err on the side of caution and tie the thing down using a cheap Kensington lock cable. Most laptop thieves go for easy targets and a physical deterrent such as this will easily put them off and save you the heartache of a lost laptop. 

Encrypt the hard disk drive

Consider a full disk encryption of your laptop's hard disk drive. For most organisations, the content of the laptop is much more valuable than the physical machine. So you would be doing yourself a world of good and much more needed peace of mind knowing that even if the machine is lost, the content of the drive will not be accessible to the new "owner". Windows Vista comes with BitLocker - a drive encryption software - use it. There are quite a number of other third party full disk encryption utilities available, if you don't use Vista. My recommendation will always be to use a full-disk encryption utility. 

Don't use an easy to guess password

I didn't say use a password because I am assuming that you know you must use a password on a laptop, to add another layer of protection. What I am suggesting is that such passwords must not be easy to guess combinations such as the birthdays of any member of your family, name of your pet or a logical string of characters or numbers. Ensure that the Administrator account is particularly very secure. 

Insure your laptop

Don't be "penny-wise and pound foolish" because at the end of the day, if your laptop is nicked, then you will have to replace it. There is no need to mourn the loss of your data while scratching your head for where you'll get the money to pick up a replacement - let the insurance man pick up that tab!

Install antivirus and spyware prevention software

Take the two issues of virus and spyware seriously. Consider having both protection on your laptop - don't overlook spyware as many of these can log your keystrokes as you work outside of your company's much needed firewall protection.

Install a firewall software

Using the Internet these days is almost taken for granted and on a laptop, used outside the company's protective firewall, your only recourse would be a firewall software. This way, unwanted traffic is kept at bay.

Install only the Windows services that you need

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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