U Louisville Goes with GuardianEdge To Protect Sensitive Data

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 10/31/08

The University of Louisville has selected technology from GuardianEdge for hard disk encryption, smartphone protection and device control to safeguard data for the campus community. A motive for the deployment is the concern about potential data breaches.

"It's just amazing the things that people have on their laptops," said Brenda Gombosky, director of enterprise network security. "We wanted an encryption solution that was centrally managed so if, for example, a researcher or doctor is out of the area and forgets his or her password, they can call back to the help desk and recover it. We are now starting to use [Microsoft] Active Directory to manage the system and also like [the fact] that the end users don't have to determine what they need to encrypt. With other products that we evaluated, the burden really fell on the end users. The way that GuardianEdge's products work is seamless."

Gombosky said she and her team selected GuardianEdge during their vendor trial because of the breadth of the offerings, including smartphone encryption. The University of Louisville is in the process of deploying 250 licenses of GuardianEdge's Smartphone as well as 3,000 licenses of Hard Disk Encryption and 1,000 licenses of Device Control. The university's deployment of the Device Control solution will soon be replaced by the new version of the company's Removable Storage product. This solution lets users transfer encrypted data to any computer using removable storage devices.

Gombosky said the next step is to increase awareness of privacy and data protection issues within the university. "If something does happen, no matter how small the loss, at least we can say that we have a protection plan in place that makes sure that the information that resided on the machines is safe," she explained.

The University of Louisville has about 22,000 students and consists of three campuses.