Many corporate execs seem to think that whole-disk encryption alone will save their butts in case their laptop ever gets stolen. They use it as a kind of insurance against carelessness. Not quite.

It's worth noting that encryption by itself does not stop a data breach from happening. It only mitigates the short-term consequences. To truly protect your company, you still need a full-service security deployment, and all the inconveniences that come with it.

Once the data has left your hands, encrypted or not, the damage has been done and there's nothing you can do to stop it. A bad guy could copy it, keep it on the shelf, and wait 15 years until we have quantum computers that can break RSA. Then he knows all your old secrets which could still be very damaging 15 years later.

A few months ago, someone stole a local hospital's backup tapes from a courier van. Although the tapes were properly encrypted, the hospital still freaked out about it, with good reason. They even paid for credit monitoring for everyone on the tapes. Once the cops recovered the stolen tapes, they sent them to the FBI to assess whether the tapes had been accessed by the thief.