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Even the MoD had to own up recently to having a laptop containing confidential employee and banking information stolen from a motorway service station.

Data encryption is such an obvious solution to this perennial problem and there is no shortage of choices. Integral Memory specialises in this area and provides some of the most secure solutions available.

It offers a wide range of products providing hardware encryption and claims its Crypto SSD is the most secure solid state drive on the market. A big advantage these have over software products is all encryption/decryption is carried out internally by their dedicated processor and so have no host system overheads.

The Crypto SSD is sealed in a tamper-proof epoxy resin shell and protected further by a metal outer case. With no moving parts, it's resistant to shocks, is completely silent and produces very little heat.

The drive has standard SATA and power interfaces, and supports speeds up to 6Gbits/sec. It employs military-grade AES-256 encryption and is certified to the FIPS 140-2 standard - an absolute requirement for sale into the US Federal Government.

For the Crypto SSD to provide total protection, it must have the OS installed directly on it. You can use disk cloning software, if it's replacing an existing disk, but we had no problems fitting the SSD in a desktop PC and installing a fresh copy of Windows 7 Professional on it.

The next step is to run the supplied SSDLock software with administrative privileges. It's simple to use and offers a dual mode, which allows you to create Master and User accounts - so, if the latter forgets their password, the former can go in and reset it for them.

Strong passwords are mandatory and we could set a failed login limit from 6 to 20 attempts. This circumvents brute force password attacks, as once the retry count has been exceeded, the SSD will lock itself, requiring the Master to re-create the user's account.

However, if the user name is persistently entered incorrectly, the SSD will reset and erase itself. In single user mode, it will also erase itself if either the username or password is incorrectly entered.

On completion, the PC was powered down and, on the next power up, the BIOS boot screen asked for a user name and password. And that's all there is to it, as from this point onwards we continued to use the PC normally where we could see no noticeable difference in performance.

We tested the dual mode settings by powering the PC off and on, and incorrectly entering the user account password. After six attempts, the boot screen advised us to contact the administrator to get our account reset and all further attempts to use this account name received the same warning.

We then tried to login with the wrong user name and were warned that, if we continued down this path, it would erase the SSD. We persisted and, sure enough, the SSD erased itself. When we rebooted our PC, we found it was completely devoid of the OS and all data.

During testing, we found the Crypto SSD extremely easy to use and capable of providing a completely transparent encryption/decryption process. When data security solutions are this easy to deploy, businesses really have no excuses for not using them to ensure their sensitive data is totally secure, no matter where it ends up.

Product: Crypto SSD
Supplier: Integral Memory
Web site: www.integralmemory.com
Available from all good IT resellers
Price: 512GB Crypto (SSD FIPS 140-2), £253 exc VAT (from Insight UK)
Crypto SSD is also available in mSATA, M.2 SSD formats.