Encryption for Students

You work hard every day to get ahead. From papers to exams to lectures, you balance it all so you can keep up in class and stay on top of homework. One day, you spend hours working on your final term paper in the University library. You briefly leave your workstation to pick out a book, only to return to find your laptop missing.

What did you lose?

It's more than a piece of hardware - that laptop could contain your grades, class notes, and years of research. Your student records could be saved on that hard drive, along with your banking information, tuition statements, and social insurance number. You may have backups of all your work, and you may have protected your laptop with a password. But if it's not encrypted, the thief who stole it can easily bypass your password and access all that information.

From Australia to the UK to the US, unencrypted university laptops are lost or stolen at an alarming rate. A study by Kensington showed that one laptop is stolen every 53 seconds and 70 million smartphones are lost each year. Of those, only 7% are ever recovered.

Encryption is a process that turns the information stored on your device into unintelligible text characters that cannot be deciphered and read without the decryption key. By encrypting your device, you are ensuring that if someone takes it, they cannot read what's on it.

Encrypting your device can protect:

• the personal information of the University's staff and students;
• confidential information about the institution;
• class materials, grades, assignments and exams;
• intellectual property;
• student and employee records.

Any mobile device that holds sensitive information should be encrypted. This includes laptops, USB flash drives, tablets, and mobile phones. Don't want someone reading your personal information? Encrypt the device storing it.