What is Bulk Data Encryption?

I would like to know more about safeguarding the sensitive data that is stored on our company laptops. The IT guy doesn't seem to have much knowledge on this subject. I just heard about Bulk Data Encryption. Could you please describe that in English?

Bulk Data Encryption is one of the safest ways to protect data on a laptop hard drive. The data isn't "protected" behind some cheesy, nearly useless password, it is encrypted.

Traditionally most hardware or software encryption solutions ate up CPU time, bogging down systems. This is the beauty of BDE. Hitachi says it best in their PDF:

A hard disk drive, with encryption as part of the HDD hardware itself, is such a (encryption) solution. Bulk Data Encryption by Hitachi enables a powerful encryption engine, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES 128), as part of the drive electronics System on Chip (SoC). When this option is enabled, the hard drive will encrypt all data that comes from the system and write it to the media. When read back, the drive decrypts the data so that it can be understood by the system. Since the hard drive is doing all the encryption work using hardware, there is no impact on system performance and no need for additional software.

Basically, simply setting a HD password enables the BDE. If the laptop is lost or stolen, you can rest assured the data is encrypted using 128bit encryption.

With Hitachi hard drives coming standard with Bulk Data Encryption there is absolutely no excuse for sensitive data to fall into the wrong hands.