PC maker Lenovo has introduced Hardware Password Manager, reported to be the latest advancement for businesses to manage data security and a universal tool to work with all brands of hard drives with full disk encryption.
According to the company, this new tool allows IT administrators to remotely manage employee hard drive passwords, including drives that are self-encrypting, on many Lenovo Think-branded laptops and desktops. Remote management helps make adoption of FDE hard drives a more viable option for many companies now that IT administrators can easily centrally control and reset hard drive passwords.
Hardware Password Manager not only helps companies increase their overall level of data security but also helps them reduce the time and expense associated with resetting employee passwords, said Lenovo.
With Hardware Password Manager, IT administrators can create an administrative user ID and hardware password within a vault in the PC’s BIOS. The administrator can then deploy the PC or remotely send the installation package to an employee’s PC in the field.
Additionally, Hardware Password Manager allows for central management of the BIOS Supervisor password, helping control the configuration of BIOS settings on a deployment of PCs. In some industries, regulation and contract requirements mandate certain BIOS configurations, and without central management of the Supervisor password, meeting that requirement can be costly and labor intensive, noted Lenovo.
Peter Schrady, vice president and general manager for enterprise, software and peripherals at Lenovo, said: Encrypting drives offer state-of-the-art protection for PC data, but companies everywhere previously had difficulty managing them. Lenovo’s new Hardware Password Manager product provides an easy tool to reset passwords by remote control, including full-encryption drives. This is the world’s only solution to centrally manage all available brands of fully encrypting drives. The fact that it can also utilize our fingerprint reader to access encrypted drives makes it even better.
