In light of several high profile instances of laptops containing being lost or stolen in recent years, and due to recent losses of university laptops, my school is implementing mandatory encryption of all laptops that contain sensitive university data on them, whether they are personal or university owned. I think this is a wise idea and isn’t a bad one for every laptop owner to consider.
Dad and I were discussing this today. The chief disadvantage is that sometimes it is helpful to swap hard drives on computers for testing/diagnosis, file transfers and other legitimate actions. However, the ease of hard drive swapping is exactly why encryption is being implemented—to lock a hard drive down if someone is trying to access it by attaching it to another computer and bypassing user authentication.
