If you want to bring your own Android or iOS tablet to work, you should consider a couple of factors before taking the plunge. First, in some respects you lose ownership of your device once you commit to using it at work and keeping potentially sensitive data on it. Corporate intellectual property or client data is extremely valuable to your employer, and as such you lose certain freedoms regarding any device that contains that information. Mishandle that information, and you might lose your job.
Second, you have to think about how to secure the device against tampering, to protect its information and thereby minimize your loss of ownership. If you plan to store confidential material of any kind on your tablet, you’ll want to safeguard that data against the chance that you lose the device or let it slip into the wrong hands.
So how do you keep your data secure? You encrypt it. The field of data encryption is always changing, and you can encrypt your tablet in many different ways. Here are a few popular methods of tablet encryption that I was able to test.
Encryption Basics
For our purposes, encryption is a process that changes data in a way that makes it unreadable to anyone who doesn’t possess the key to unlock it. The data is, in theory, useless without the key, thus affording some measure of security in the case of theft or loss.Encryption itself is a complicated topic. For a PC, you can purchase encryption software or encrypted hardware, as well as products that encrypt the “whole” disc, including the Master Boot Record. The debate over which approach is better rages on.
