This editorial was originally published on Jun 6, 2006. Steve is traveling in the UK this week and we are reprinting a few pieces.

Or is it a sign of the times and something that we'll have in the news on a regular basis for the next few years? Another laptop theft with data, this time from Hotels.com. It was actually an Ernst & Young laptop, the firm that audits hotels.com, but still.

This makes me feel silly for complaining about JD Edwards laptops and the required Pointsec encryption we had to put on every laptop. I didn't like it at the time, but it wasn't a horrible intrusion and these days I think a necessary one.

With all of the hype on identity theft, data privacy, and portable computers, I cannot believe that every company that allows any data to go outside of their physical office, whether on a backup tape or a laptop, doesn't require encryption or some type of protection. At least do something to protect it. Most thefts are random and the thief probably wasn't looking for credit card data, so a simple password might protect the data in most cases.

If governments want to do something about identity theft and privacy, pass that law. Force everyone to encrypt their data and us in IT to come up with good ways to protect it. I didn't like encrypting backups with Litespeed, the only choice a few years ago, but it was worth it to protect backup tapes. Now with more choices at very reasonable prices, and MSDE/SQL Express able to use them, every database that contains individual data, and especially financial data, should have its backups encrypted.