A “self-encrypted” internal laptop drive has been developed by Origin Storage to help firms more easily protect their company data.

The self-encrypted drive (SED) allows firms to use the highest levels of hardware AES 256-bit encryption. The Enigma SED was demonstrated at last week’s Infosecurity Europe show in London.

With remote working at firms now widespread organisations are issuing laptops in preference to standard desktop PCs. At the same time, said Origin, companies are putting at risk the security of sensitive and confidential information in areas outside their physical control.

Andy Cordial, managing director of Origin Storage, said, “With over 3,500 laptops going missing every week in European airports and the average cost of a data breach to an organisation being £1.7m, it’s now imperative that organisations take extra precautions to protect the data stored on all their computer systems, especially laptops.”

The Enigma SED system provides permanent full disk encryption on the fly, which means no speed degradation when reading and writing data. The Enigma SED is a 100% compatible upgrade to corporate laptops, with each hard drive supplied with the correct fitting kit pre-mounted ready to fit straight into the laptop.

The system comes with MySecureDoc Express software from WinMagic which is a pre-boot authentication system that allows the user to access the system and data using a password. Data from an existing hard drive can be transferred to the new encrypted drive using a bundled transfer cable and cloning software.