Dell will be the first computer maker to ship a laptop with Seagate's 160GB self-encrypting hard drive. And McAfee will provide software for enterprise -wide management of laptops with Seagate secure hard drives.

A Laptop Stolen Every Minute

"Delivering easy-to-use notebook security that also is cost effective requires leading partnerships and technologies," said Tom Major, vice president of the personal compute business unit at Seagate. "Seagate is pleased to be teaming with industry leaders to simplify security management for our customers and providing our OEM and channel customers with the world's fastest self-encrypting hard drive."

Laptop data security is becoming more important in the midst of rampant global adoption of mobile PCs, especially considering a laptop is stolen every 53 seconds and 97 percent are never recovered, according to the FBI. Laptops often contain sensitive personal and business information, and lost or stolen laptops can cost companies millions of dollars in compromised proprietary information and threaten consumers with identity theft.

Seagate's new Momentus FDE (full-disk encryption) laptop hard drives, 5400- and 7200-rpm models with capacities of up to a half terabyte, aim to guard against unauthorized access to information. The Momentus FDE drives feature government-grade encryption.

Data Privacy Law Compliance

McAfee is providing its ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) management system and endpoint encryption client to Seagate for its Momentus FDE hard drives. The companies said this integration will give customers user-rich features and enterprise management capabilities that IT administrators need to secure laptop computers.

"McAfee provides leading enterprise-class, powerful encryption and strong access-control technologies," said Tony Jennings, vice president of strategic partnerships at McAfee. "By teaming with Seagate on its new encrypting Momentus drive, we are extending additional protection tools to our customers."

In addition to leveraging Seagate Momentus FDE hard drives and McAfee ePO, IT security personnel can also enforce policy management globally and enable token authentication and end-user password recovery. They can also help organizations prove a missing laptop was encrypted at the time it was lost or stolen -- a requirement for compliance with many data-privacy laws.

A Mature Security Perspective

In the security world, more resources have historically been invested into securing handheld devices than laptops. That's ridiculous, said Zeus Kerravala, a vice president at the Yankee Group, since the amount of data stored on a laptop is 100 times that on a mobile phone.

"There's been very few products on the market that address actual laptop security. Seagate's announcement with Dell solves part of that problem," Kerravala said. "This solution is purpose-built for the mobile world, whereas if you look at notebook technology we had in the past, security was almost an afterthought."

Kerravala expects the PC market will see more technology used to address mobile laptop security due to market maturity. The demand is present, and vendors are rising to meet the demand.