BitLocker is Microsoft’s proprietary encryption program for Windows that can encrypt your entire drive as well as help protect against unauthorized changes to your system such as firmware-level malware. This application is a data protection feature that integrates with the operating system and addresses threats of data theft or exposure from lost, stolen, or inappropriately decommissioned computers.
BitLocker is primarily designed to prevent a user’s data from being viewed, extracted or retrieved in case a drive is stolen.
Remote Server Administration Tools, to best help you manage BitLocker, are:
BitLocker Recovery Password Viewer: Enables you to locate and view BitLocker Drive Encryption recovery passwords that have been backed up to Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS). You can use this tool to help recover data that is stored on a drive that has been encrypted by using BitLocker. Additionally, you can right-click a domain container and then search for a BitLocker recovery password across all the domains in the Active Directory forest.
BitLocker Drive Encryption Tools: Both manage BDE and the BitLocker cmdlets can be used to perform any task that can be accomplished through the BitLocker control panel, and they are appropriate to use for automated deployments and other scripting scenarios. Repair BDE is provided for disaster recovery scenarios in which a BitLocker protected drive cannot be unlocked normally or by using the recovery console.
The best type of security measures are transparent to the user during implementation and use. Every time there is a possible delay or difficulty because of a security feature, there is strong likelihood that users will try to bypass security. This situation is especially true for data protection, and is a scenario that organizations need to avoid. In fact, you can take several steps in advance to prepare for data encryption to make the deployment quick and smooth. BitLocker is capable of encrypting entire hard drives, including system and data drives.
Why you should use BitLocker?
1. Confidential data
The most common use of BitLocker is to protect the data on stolen laptops. Even if you are not an IT pro, you should know that anybody can access the data on an unencrypted disk without requiring any passwords by booting up from a second drive. Thus, hard disk encryption is the only way to protect the data on a stolen laptop or Stolen disks from PCs or servers.
2. USB and External Drives
Bitlocker encryption can be placed on external drives as well. These are a smaller form factor and can be more easily stolen or misplaced. With Bitlocker encryption you will require the password to view the data. In order to remove Bitlocker encryption, you will need the recovery key that you receive upon setup.
3. System data
Once an attacker has physical access to one of your company’s system disks, this opens a variety of ways to attack your whole network. Brute force attacks to crack cached passwords is only one option. If the stolen computer is a domain member, a hacker can use its trust relationship to access other machines in your organization. However, if the disk is encrypted, the culprit has little chance to compromise your network.
4. Disk crashes and disk disposal
Broken disks can be a liability. Most of the time we may think that a crashed disk can do no harm, but anyone with access to that disk can easily steal your data if it is not encrypted. In addition to this, the disposal of obsolete disks is important. For every hard drive there comes a time when it becomes outdated or broken. If all the disks in your organization are BitLocker encrypted, you can rest assured you are protected before you correctly dispose of them.
Do you want to know more about Bitlocker and how this Microsoft application can help you and your company? Contact us here.
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