The company also sells to the consumer, education and government markets. (The company’s service is active on more than one million notebooks today, about 43% of which belong to corporate customers. Still, Livingston says they have about a 75% success rate physically recovering the machines. Also, people can use Internet cafes or wireless connections. That’s not a foolproof method, since many consumer IP addresses are variable every time someone goes online. It contacts ISPs to get billing addresses for the corresponding IP addresses, gets subpoenas if necessary, and works with local law enforcement to physically recover the machines. When it does, the company uses IP addresses to locate the lost notebook. How does the technology work? After a customer calls to report a missing notebook, the company’s servers wait for the lost machine to go online. In other words, the capability sits there in many notebooks today, ready to be turned on, if an enterprise customer activates the service (via their notebook vendor, for $125 for 3 years before volume discounting.)
His company compares its Computrace notebook-locating services to “LoJack for Laptops.” Absolute has struck deals with the major notebook vendors (Dell, Lenovo, Gateway, HP and others) to embed its firmware in each machine’s BIOS. What’s the right answer to notebook drift for your enterprise? That’s a question you should be asking now, if you haven’t already.
#Absolute lojack embedded into bios software#
As Absolute Software CEO John Livingston puts it “Only because of the data breach laws has anyone started to care.” Now notebook drift can equal serious legal and financial pain when the data on those machines also vanishes. This has echoes of both Rakshasa and vPro. Total device security never felt this good.
That is, before data breach laws put a whole new spin on this equation. Absolute persistence technology is built into the BIOS or firmware of a device during the manufacturing process. Built into the BIOS or firmware during the manufacturing process of the leading device manufacturers, Absolute is able to provide its customers with the only security solution that can withstand a factory reset, installation of a new OS or even a complete hard drive replacement. A certain number of mobile assets have always been lost, yet it’s been a loss that many enterprises chose to eat. Did that make you wrinkle your brow? It should have. If you’re an enterprise that leases notebook PCs, about 15 percent of your machines may “drift” away over the course of two years, never to be returned to IT.
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