When using a computer or a removable media, chances are that you have proprietary, sensitive or even business critical data on these devices. Whether it's a home computer with your private financial data, your company’s computer with sensitive corporate information, or a thumb drive with government secrets, it is vital to ensure that there is no unauthorized access to that data should the device be lost or stolen. Grayteq Encryption protects your data, by rendering it unreadable to unauthorized users.
What is Drive Encryption?
When it comes to encrypting data, there are numerous encryption methods available. It is vital that if an encrypted disk, file or folder is lost, stolen, or placed into another computer, encryption state must remain unchanged, ensuring only authorized users can access its contents. Encryption protects a file, a folder, a partition or even a full disk in the event of theft or accidental loss by encrypting the selected data. An application such as Encryption protects individual files and folders, by auto-applying encryption/decryption, based upon user credentials. Neither Grayteq’s file-, nor drive encryption don’t require special user action while Encryption automatically encrypts everything you create and save into the Vault. Encryption cannot however, protect your data when you have logged into the system during startup and leave your computer unattended, while unauthorized users can access your system just as authorized users could.
Grayteq Security Administrators may create and deliver encryption rules across the organization, including automatically encrypting files from various applications and/or folders.
How Encryption Drive Encryption Works
After the user enters valid authentication credentials, the operating system continues to load as normal and the user can access the computer. Drive encryption software also provides the ability to encrypt removable storage media such as USB drives. When you insert an encrypted USB drive into a computer system, upon your pre-entered Windows authentication credentials, you can use the USB drive as a normal, un-encrypted one while all file encryption/decryption occurs in real-time, when you open the file, or when you save or close it.
Drive Encryption: Behind the Scenes
When a user initiates access to a file, folder, or disk (i.e., creates, opens, or deletes a file), the request is sent to the operating system input/output (I/O) manager, which forwards the request to the file system manager. The file system manager processes data in blocks.
Life with Encryption: Business as Usual
Most drive encryption software operates in conjunction with the file system architecture. It filters I/O operations for one or more file systems or file system volumes. When a drive is encrypted with drive encryption for the first time, it converts unencrypted drive blocks into encrypted blocks one at a time.
Drive Encryption allows users to continue working as normal during this initial encryption process by varying the amount CPU power assigned to the initial encryption process.
How Drive Encryption Works in Users' eyes
When a user accesses a file, Drive Encryption decrypts the data in memory before it is presented for viewing. If the user makes any changes to the file, the data is encrypted in memory and written back to the relevant disk drive block just as it would be without encryption.
The encryption/decryption process happens at such a speed that it appears completely transparent to the user and Grayteq Encryption makes sure that decrypted data is never available on the disk.