You would think that with all the exposure that companies get these days regarding lost or stolen laptops and the client data that usually goes along with it that we would be seeing less and less of the big scandals.  And yet, today's article regarding a laptop sold on eBay (containing details of 1 million customers) shows how prevalent the issue still is.  At my current company we dealt with the issue a couple years ago and took the simple approach of encrypting hard drives on all of our devices.  This was a good first step and there are things we are doing above and beyond that to offer additional protection for memory sticks, USB drives, etc. but the majority of our headaches are resolved with just that simple act.

There are several ways to accomplish hard drive encryption.  We chose PGP's Whole Disk Encryption solution and it has worked very well with minimal support needs.   Microsoft and others have leveraged the TPM chips in today's laptops to come up with their own solutions including the BitLocker technology within Windows Vista.  As both a technology professional and a consumer, I beg you, if your company stores detailed financiual or personal information make sure you are doing something like this to protect yourselves and your clients.