According to John Livingston, CEO of Absolute Software, more than 700,000 computers are stolen each year in the United States and many of these contain sensitive or irreplaceable data. "Securing the data on notebook PCs is one of the toughest challenges for IT professionals, and with the proliferation of mobile computing across all business segments, the threat of data loss and network breaches through theft of notebooks has never been greater," William Diehl, Gateway's vice president of product marketing, said. "By embedding Gateway's Mobile Theft Protection Solution and TPM 1.2 into the PC, we are able to provide CIOs with the investment protection and data security they need in a solution that lowers the cost of ownership and is easy to deploy and support, he added.
Diehl says that the new security system will start to make laptop thieves look for computers that don't have the anti-theft measures installed.
In the event a computer is stolen, Absolute guarantees the recovery of the computer, and can remotely delete sensitive data from the stolen computer when data privacy is a concern. In addition, If the computer is not recovered within 60 days, the customer may be eligible for a Recovery Guarantee payment of up to $1,000.
Like LoJack for notebooks, it locates lost or stolen computers, minimizes replacement costs and enables sensitive data to be deleted discretely by remote control from a missing PC through ensuring sensitive assets and/or personal information are not compromised.
Computrace also provides IT managers with a cost-effective solution for tracking computer location, providing computer hardware/software inventories, managing lease returns, enabling software title tracking and license compliance, identifying unsupported applications and unauthorized memory or hard drive installations, reducing support costs and harmful security threats.
In addition to safeguarding against system or data loss, Gateway's new professional notebooks now support Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 1.2 the latest hardware security standard to provide hardware-level system security.
TPM allows users to encrypt data and manage passwords; it also provides secure authentication to networks by storing keys, passwords and digital certificates. It provides a much more secure environment than passwords and software-based solutions that are vulnerable to hacking and cyber attacks. Critical applications and capabilities such as secure email, secure web access and local protection of data are much more secure when running on a Trusted Computing Platform.
Gateway's Mobile Theft Protection Solution is available now on its full line of professional notebooks, including the Gateway M250, M460 and M680. Customers simply need to activate the Computrace service with Absolute Software, which starts at $99 for three years of coverage. The Gateway M250, M460 and M680 are compatible with the Trusted Computing Platform 1.2 out of the box.
